Latest News from Open Web

Google Sends Maps to Search Unit, Boss to Google X

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 08:00:00 EDT

No sooner had Google CEO Larry Page said that Android chief Andy Rubin would stop running the unit he created and that Android would be joined to the Chrome operation under Chrome boss Sundar Pichai than the company quietly said it’s breaking up its maps and commerce unit and that its head Jeff Huber is also stepping aside like Rubin. Unlike Rubin, Huber has a destination. He’s moving to Google X, the cockamamie unit run by Google co-founder Sergey Brin that the Wall Street Journal says is working on Google Glass and self-driving cars.

Android Chief Andy Rubin Steps Down

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:30:00 EDT

After taking giant bites out of Apple, Android chief Andy Rubin is apparently sated. He’s stepping away from his fiefdom, according to a blog post by Google CEO Larry Page, to look for something else to do inside of Google. Chrome and Apps chief Sundar Pichai, who turned down a job running product at Twitter, is going to take over Android too. One is left to imagine the backstory behind the surprise announcement Wednesday. The Chrome operating system has started to resemble Android and the Chrome browser has built a sizeable base. Google bought the open source OS and Rubin along with it in 2005 and Rubin has now seen his creation activated on 750 million smartphones and tablets via more than 60 manufacturers and 25 billion apps downloaded from Google Play.

Google’s Chairman Lands in North Korea

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 07:00:00 EST

Despite State Department sensitivities, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas director Jared Cohen, a former State Department policy wonk who now heads Google’s New York-based think tank, landed in Pyongyang, North Korea Monday as part of the entourage accompanying former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson. The US State Department opposed the four-day visit as “unhelpful” because it follows so closely on North Korea’s launch of a long-range rocket last month that deployed a satellite into space, a move the United Nations Security Council condemned as a violation of its prohibition on the country’s covert tests of long-range missiles. The rogue nation is intent on developing a nuclear-tipped warhead that could reach California and the UN is still figuring out an official response to the launch.

A Few Days with the Google ARM Chromebook

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 08:45:00 EST

I recently (finally) received the Google Chromebook in the mail. After over 2 weeks of intense waiting, it is here, and has absolutely matched all of my expectations. The device is thin and light and amazing looking. It is quite and never gets hot, even after extended use. The battery life has easily outmatched the advertised 6 hours, with pretty standard web use and writing (some streaming video and some streaming music as well). After a few hours, I did not want to trade it for anything else, and preferred it to any other laptop I’ve ever had. I’ve looked at a couple of Ultrabooks, the MacBook Air and tablet/keyboard options, and nothing touches the power, simplicity, weight and price. While the Intel (x86) based ultrabooks and MBA are great, powerful and capable, they are easily 3 to 4 times more expensive than the Chromebook, a cost which is hard to justify in my mind. I have used the Asus Transformer Prime with keyboard dock, as well the Nexus 7 with Bluetooth keyboard, and neither experience rivals the ease of use and content creation that the Chromebook offers.

Android Encrypted Databases

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 08:00:00 EDT

The Android development community, as might be expected, is a pretty vibrant community with a lot of great contributors helping people out. Since Android is largely based upon Java, there is a lot of skills reusability between the Java client dev community and the Android Dev community. As I mentioned before, encryption as a security topic is perhaps the weakest link in that community at this time. Perhaps, but since that phone/tablet could end up in someone else’s hands much more easily than your desktop or even laptop, it is something that needs a lot more attention from business developers. When I set out to write my first complex app for Android, I determined to report back to you from time-to-time about what needed better explanation or intuitive solutions. Much has been done in the realm of “making it easier”, except for security topics, which still rank pretty low on the priority list. So using encrypted SQLite databases is the topic of this post. If you think it’s taking an inordinate amount of time for me to complete this app, consider that I’m doing it outside of work. This blog was written during work hours, but all of the rest of the work is squeezed into two hours a night on the nights I’m able to dedicate time. Which is far from every night.

Introducing Octopus Microstock

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 16:08:00 EDT

As the global microstock industry has been demonstrating a rapid growth, it has become a real challenge for a contributor to succeed and keep up with the market pace. A microstock contributor has to produce quality content and they have to do it quickly. What they also have to do is to be careful and [...]

Google Killing Off More Products

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 21:41:00 EDT

When it rains, it pours for Google products. The company just announced – via a poston Google’s official blog – that it’s giving the axe to three more of its Web and mobile products. Additionally, Google’s going to start parsing down its more infrequently updated blogs from the more than 150 official “communications channels” that the company maintains. So, what’s first on the chopping block? Google Apps for Teams – first launched in 2008 as a way to allow business or school users to collaborate across Google tools without having to first sign up for a Google email address – is apparently, “not as useful for people as we originally anticipated,” wrote Google’s Max Ibel.

Google Wallet Moves to the Cloud

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:41:00 EDT

Google Wallet has been hampered by a number of limitations since its launch, not the least of which is its limited device compatibility. Perhaps a bigger problem though, was its lack of support for most major credit and debit cards. Today that finally changes with the latest version of Big G’s mobile payment system. Now you’ll be able to use any credit or debit card you wish, and take them with you from one device to the next. Early versions of the digital wallet used the phones secure local storage to protect your card info, now it’s all in the cloud allowing you to sync your preferred payment method across multiple devices and keep track of both your online and in-store purchase’s through Google’s web Wallet.

Search In Cursive

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 14:21:00 EDT

Google just added a new feature to its mobile search page that lets you hand-write search queries in cursive and block letters. Once you have enabled this new feature, you can simply start writing on your screen and Google will translate your scribbles into a legible search query. The new feature will work on iOS5+ devices, as well as Android 2.3+ phones and Android 4.0 tablets. You can write both single letters and complete words on the screen (assuming they are short enough to fit on your phone’s screen). In our brief test, this new feature worked surprisingly well.

Google to Get $22.5 Million Wrist Slap: WSJ

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:15:00 EDT

Google is reportedly close to paying a $22.5 million fine to settle charges that it secretly bypassed the privacy settings of millions of Apple users. According to the Wall Street Journal, “the charges involve Google’s use of a special computer code to trick Apple’s Safari web-browsing software into letting it monitor users that had blocked such tracking” on their computers and iPhones. Google claims it was inadvertent. The fine is reportedly the largest the Federal Trade Commission has ever levied.

Do Software Patents Stifle Innovation?

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 10:30:00 EDT

Of late patents around mobile technologies have been in the news. Four high profile news items are (1) Oracle suing Google for Java patent violation, (2) Apple and Samsung fighting each other in different parts of the world, Microsoft, Apple, Rim and others jointly buying Nortel patent library for $4.5 billion and (4) Google buys Motorola Mobile and gets 17,000 patents. This is only the tip of the iceberg. This diagram from Reuters shows the complex battlefield of mobile patent and significant portion of these patents are for software.

Google Drive: It’s Slick, Integrated… and Not Exactly Free

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 17:44:00 EDT

Google has opened Google Drive, a service to store files online and share them among various computing devices that turns out to be a lot more important than you might think. Read the full story at CNET

WordPerfect Jury Deadlocks

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 07:32:00 EST

The jury that sat through eight weeks of complicated testimony and 600 exhibits over whether or not Microsoft broke the antitrust laws and tied a can to WordPerfect’s tail to maintain its monopoly after Novell bought the software 17 years ago couldn’t come to a unanimous decision Friday after three days of deliberation. The jury’s foreman reportedly sent out a note to the judge late Friday afternoon saying, “I’m sorry, very sorry we cannot come to one accord. I’ve done the best I know how.” Novell asked for one more day. District Court Judge Frederick Motz – who didn’t think the case should be heard in the first place – reportedly asked the five men and seven women on the jury to keep on trying, and take the weekend to think about it, but when they insisted that resolution was hopeless, he dismissed them and declared a mistrial. They were split 11 to one in Novell’s favor, according to Novell lawyers, who indicated the naysayer had strong technical views. Reports say the jurors, some of them in tears, were “emotional” over their deadlock, and otherwise fatigued and stressed. PC World says shortly before the jury threw in the towel one juror asked to withdraw, but the judge refused. Whether that was the holdout is unclear. Novell was hoping to collect a billion dollars in damages, which under antitrust law could have been trebled. After spending millions on the case since it filed suit in 2004 Novell will now have to go back to square one unless Microsoft, having narrowly skirted a loss, is suddenly willing to settle. The Dow Jones reported Friday night that Novell will seek a retrial. Novell maintains that in 1994 Microsoft purposely removed extensions from Windows 95 to delay WordPerfect and Novell’s Quattro Pro spreadsheet in reaching market, giving its own word processor and Excel spreadsheet an unfair advantage. Bill Gates testified at the trial that the interfaces were removed because they made the operating system unstable. However, a Gates e-mail from October of 1994 submitted in evidence read, “We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for [the] likes of Notes, WordPerfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage.” With WordPerfect’s market share burning through the floor, down 40% in six years, Novell sold the thing to Corel in 1996 at a $1.2 billion loss. It only bought the stuff two years before when WordPerfect was already on a slippery slope. Novell reportedly couldn’t figure out whether to back Windows 95 or OS/2. Several times during its deliberations the jury asked for clarifications, including the meaning the term middleware. PC World says it later asked whether Windows 95 was considered an operating system or middleware.

WordPerfect Jury Deadlocks

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 07:32:00 EST

Cloudera Receives $40 Million in D-Round Funding

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:46:00 EST

Apache Hadoop start-up Cloudera, which just signed an alliance with NetApp like rival MapR’s got with storage big shot EMC, turned up Tuesday at Hadoop World in New York with $40 million stuffed in its pockets. The D round led by Ignition Partners ups its total funding to a serious $76 million. Existing investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners and In-Q-Tel also kicked in. Accel means to make a habit of Big Data investments, believing Big Data “will drive the next-generation of multibillion-dollar software companies.” It just launched a $100 million Big Data Fund and is looking for “category-defining companies at every layer of the Big Data stack.” It ticked off storage, data management platforms, applications and services, including data analytics, vertical applications and mobile. The fund is described as being “aligned” with Cloudera, which will be brought in for advice on developing applications on the Apache Hadoop platform. Accel is already invested in Counchbase and its NoSQL database technology. Cloudera has earmarked its new money for expanding sales and marketing and supporting “key strategic initiatives.” Cloudera was the first company to make Hadoop an enterprise-ready solution, and has collected a reported hundred customers including eBay, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Its Distribution Including Apache Hadoop (CDH), which is pure open source Apache Hadoop bundled with other Apache projects in the Hadoop stack, is recognized as the most widely deployed Hadoop distribution in both commercial and non-commercial environments. The Big Data outfit also sells Cloudera Enterprise, subscription-based software that includes its Management Suite for operating Hadoop clusters at scale in demanding production deployments.

NetApp Teams with Cloudera on Turnkey Storage Device

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:23:00 EST

NetApp will be coming out with a preconfigured, ready-to-deploy cluster solution called NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop based on Cloudera’s open source distribution of Hadoop. It’s supposed to offer much needed flexibility, rapid deployment, simple scalability, better performance, self-healing technology and improved TCO. It’s supposed to address some of Hadoop’s pricey and persnickety problems with having to scale both compute and storage together. The RAID device should let them scale independently and hot-swap failed drives. NetApp will resell Cloudera support and device-specific Hadoop management software. It said the NetApp Open Solution for Hadoop includes both its E-Series Storage platform and FAS platform to deliver the performance and data management capabilities customers require for their enterprise Hadoop implementations. The device is expected to be available in December. Cloudera customers include eBay, Groupon and AOL. NetApp can get Cloudera into government, defense and financial accounts.

Vendors Survival: Will Google Survive until 2021? - Part 2

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 12:51:00 EDT

Searching the Web Search Engine is Google's most strategic product. Some of its other products are using it as component of the services they provide. Limitation or failure of it, as described in Why we desperately need a New (and Better) Google cited in part1 of this post, could negatively affect Google's market position. This is a major challenge facing Google. Google has no control of some of the factors limiting its effectiveness. Challenges in Searching the Web The following bullets describe major Web Data problems, which could affect Web Search:

CFEngine Moves Sales from Norway to US

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 23:43:00 EDT

CFEngine AS, the Norwegian outfit with the popular eponymous open source configuration and compliance management widgetry for automating distributed infrastructure, has moved its sales operation to the Palo Alto in hopes of turning its freeloading Fortune 1000 accounts into paying customers. Its first job will be to identify the big companies using its free software that haven’t taken a subscription yet. Its cross-platform commercial stuff, just upgraded to CFEngine 3 Nova, costs $250 per server. The new rev is supposed to give system administrators more control over constantly changing, increasingly complex IT infrastructure. CFEngine, a decentralized autonomous agent technology¸ can reportedly continuously monitor, self-repair and update the IT infrastructure of a global multi-site enterprise in minutes, with negligible impact on system resources or performance. Facebook, AT&T, Cisco, eBay, LinkedIn, AMD, the US Navy and five of the 10 largest banks on Wall Street use it to manage servers, desktops and other heterogeneous computing devices. The biggest difference in 3 Nova is a new report-producing GUI built with large organizations in mind. It’s supposed to turn out custom IT metrics weighted specifically to an organization’s business goals. It has also added native support for Windows and mission-critical high availability and improved its Xen and KVM hypervisor integration. CFEngine 3 Nova runs on Linux, Unix, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows and Macintosh. The company, which recently took in $4.5 million in venture capital so it can stop bootstrapping, competes against BMC and HP. It was profitable in the first half.

10gen Releases MongoDB Monitoring System

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 23:44:00 EDT

10gen, the company behind the open source MongoDB, has put out the first free NoSQL monitoring and alerting solution, which facilitates proactive alerts and support, often before a trouble ticket is filed. The cloud-based SaaS widgetry has been in beta since March with the company’s 200 commercial customers and now 10gen has released the stuff to the community. MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS) makes monitoring MongoDB clusters easier. It auto-discovers MongoDB nodes and transmits metrics on memory use, database connections, index misses, read and write operations, memory consumption and CPU usage, sending alerts if failures are detected. The SaaS delivery mechanism removes time-consuming processes such as server setup or configurations management. 10gen originally built the widgetry for its own sanity. 10gen recently announced a $20 million financing round from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital and Union Square Ventures. That makes $31.4 million altogether. The start-up claims Disney, Ericsson, Viacom, Telefonica and SAP as customers.

SCO Loses Expected Final Appeal

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:42:00 EDT

SCO has lost its second and what is expected to be its final appeal to the 10th Circuit in Denver or anywhere else. Novell owns the Unix copyrights just like a Salt Lake City jury decided last year after a two-week trial. The appeals court found that the Novell’s board “adopted a resolution approving the sale” of Unix licensing rights to SCO in 1995, but “specifically mentioned the copyrights were to be retained by Novell.” SCO won its first appeal to Denver but lost the jury trial Denver ordered which is why it appealed again. SCO’s original case against IBM for poaching Unix to improve Linux, which is still pending, is therefore presumably quashed. SCO, such as it is, which isn’t much of anything, only owns the Novell and IBM lawsuits. The company, such as it is, was sold for a song to an outfit that styles itself UnXis.

Google Gets Patent on Electronic Shipping Notifications

Sun, 21 Aug 2011 13:00:00 EDT

Google last week got a patent on estimated shipping time that it applied for on January 25, 2007. It’s titled “Electronic shipping notifications” and the abstract of US No 7,996,328 reads: “A broker facilitates customer purchases from merchants. Shippers ship shipments containing the purchases from merchants to the customers. A shipper identifies a shipment using a shipment identifier. The broker uses the shipment identifier to obtain the status information for the shipment from the shipper. The broker analyzes the status information in combination with other information to calculate an estimate of the time that the shipment will arrive at the customer’s address. The broker sends an electronic message, such as an e-mail or text message, to the customer prior to the estimated shipment arrival time to inform the customer of the impending arrival. The customer can thus arrange for someone to be at the shipping address to receive the shipment at the estimated arrival time.”

Open Cloud Initiative Revived

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 07:00:00 EDT

After a couple of false starts over the last couple of years, the Open Cloud Initiative (OCI) has been resurrected to advocate for royalty-free open standards in cloud computing with a set of Open Cloud Principles (OCP) that are unlikely to be universally accepted. It says its purpose is “to provide a legal framework within which the greater cloud computing community of users and providers can reach consensus on a set of requirements for Open Cloud, as described in the document, and then apply those requirements to cloud computing products and services, again by way of community consensus.” There will be a 30-day comment period on the Open Cloud Principles, which are described as focused on “interoperability, avoiding barriers to entry or exit and ensuring technological neutrality.”

Replacing Excel with a Web-Based Project Time Solution

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 12:11:00 EDT

Herrmann is an innovative company that offers intelligent, economic and future-oriented solutions. The pillars on which the company was founded 30 years ago and still cherish are intensive consultation, cooperation and consistent orientation to the needs of customers. The company used to manage its projects by collecting information from each employee into excel sheets. About two years ago it decided to build a centralized application to manage and monitor this data and also add functionalities in order to be able to analyze and export the working time data of projects.

Google Shuts Labs

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 07:45:00 EDT

Google said on a blog Wednesday that it’s putting “more wood behind fewer arrows” and winding down Google Labs, which gave birth to Google Alerts, Google Maps and Google SMS. The move will deprive people of being able to play with very early prototype products although Google reassured folks that it has no plans “to change in-product experimentation channels like Gmail Labs or Maps Labs. We’ll continue to experiment with new features in each of our products.”

Acquia Gets $15 Million D Round

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:36:00 EDT

Acquia, the popularizer of Drupal, the open source content management system, has gotten a $15 million D round, its largest yet, bringing total outside investment to $38.5 million. It’s supposed to use the money to expand internationally, particularly in Europe. It claims it’s seeing rapid growth with revenues up 225% year-over-year and its customer base tripling to more than 1,500 in eight months. Tenaya Capital is a new investor, which joined existing backers Northbridge and Sigma Partners in the infusion. Tenaya gets a board seat. Acquia was started by Drupal’s creator in 2008 and currently provides a managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud and a developer cloud as well as customer configurations, tools, consulting and subscription-based support and given that Drupal can be cranky, users can probably use it. Its client roster includes Twitter, Al Jazeera, Mercedes-Benz, Stanford University, Intuit and the Defense Department. It reckons that more than 2% of all web sites in the world are built on Drupal.

Schmidt to Testify

Sun, 17 Jul 2011 13:00:00 EDT

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has been delegated to go and testify before the US Senate’s antitrust subcommittee in September. Google has been reluctant to send any of its managers but then the Senate reminded Google that it had subpoena powers. Google had offered its chief legal officer David Drummond but the subcommittee wanted either Schmidt or new CEO Larry Page. The Federal Trade Commission started a formal antitrust investigation of Google last month and the European Commission is already doing the same thing. The Justice Department is also investigating Google for illegally profiting from the sale of prescription drugs from online pharmacies and reviewing its recent $400 million acquisition of Admeld.

DOJ Clears Google Buying Nortel Patents

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 07:30:00 EDT

The sealed first-round bids for the Nortel patent trove had to be in by 4 p.m. Eastern Time Monday, the same day that Microsoft, HP, Motorola Mobility, Nokia, AT&T and Verizon Communications separately objected to the terms of the apparently winner-takes-all sale. The unprecedented auction is set for Monday, June 20, at the law office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton in New York. Google’s put in a $900 million “stalking horse” bid but apparently the best of the sealed bids – perforce an amount better than Google’s – will be the opening bid and Nortel has to name it by noon on June 19.

Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich

Thu, 12 May 2011 08:00:00 EDT

In Q4 Google is promising to have in hand a unified platform combining the Gingerbread version of Android meant for phones and the Honeycomb version meant for tablets that all widgets can use regardless of screen size. The project, nicknamed Ice Cream Sandwich, is supposed to address Android’s fragmentation issues. Google is supposed to sweeten the thing with new features too. Meantime, it’s upgraded Honeycomb, otherwise known as Android 3.0, to Android 3.1, which should be available on the Verizon 3G Xoom tablet right away to address some of its issues.

FTC Gearing Up for Google Antitrust Probe: Bloomberg

Tue, 03 May 2011 07:00:00 EDT

The Federal Trade Commission is going ahead with an antitrust investigation of Google, according to Bloomberg. The wire service reports talking to three people “familiar with the matter” who said that the FTC has told “hi-tech companies to gather information for the probe.” The story suggests it might be hard for the FTC to nail Google on search but it might charge it with leveraging its monopoly into adjacent markets. Bloomberg says the agency recently hired Columbia Law professor Timothy Wu, an expert in telecommunications and copyright, who wrote both Who Controls the Internet and The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires and clerked for both the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner and Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Wu coined the term net neutrality and BusinessWeek once credited him with providing “the intellectual framework that inspired Google’s mobile phone strategy.”

Google Rallies WebM Alliance to Fight Patent Threats

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:40:00 EDT

Google has formed a new group called WebM Community Cross License initiative in order to protect its WebM video codec from patent attacks. Under this collaboration, group members will license WebM-related patents to each other under royalty-free terms. So far sixteen companies are involved in this launch including AMD, Cisco, LG and Samsung, browser makers Opera and Mozilla. This move on part of Google is certainly a defensive one to protect WebM’s reputation as a royalty free and open codec considering that MPEG LA , the patent pool organization which handles licensing for the H.264 video codec has reportedly been inspecting a similar patent-pool license for VP8 and WebM.

It's Official - Google Is Now Part of the Travel Ecosystem

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:34:06 EDT

Google acquiring ITA is an exciting development in the travel technology space. It opens up the ecosystem which is currently dominated by the GDS players. How exactly it will benefit the travelling passengers or new entrepreneurs to launch new innovative travel solutions is not yet known. The nirvana state from my perspective is the emergence of "Travel Apps Store" which will make creation and consumption of new Travel business and technology applications much more easy and interesting. Is Google - ITA a right step in that direction? Absolutely yes.

Google’s Product Chief Leaving

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 08:30:00 EDT

Google is losing its product development chief Jonathan Rosenberg, who reportedly felt he couldn’t give the company’s brand new retread CEO Larry Page the open-ended commitment to stay on the job that Page wanted. Or so the story goes. Rosenberg was planning to leave in 2013 when his younger kid starts college. Now he’s going this summer with plans to write a book with Google’s old CEO-now-executive chairman Eric Schmidt about Google’s management culture. Apparently he’ll come back as a Google consultant after a vacation.

"Small Bites All Day Long – Whatever Tastes Good."

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 09:00:00 EDT

Occasionally in the life of every commentator, even those of us who look at the future of the future day and night, you experience what amounts - yes, there is no other word for it - to an epiphany.

Google Trashes Gears

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 06:00:00 EDT

Google is dumping Gears, the widgetry used to let Google Apps work offline. The functionality has been moved to HTML 5. The company said in a blog that there will be no new Gears releases, newer browsers such as Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 won’t be supported with plug-ins, and Gears will be removed from Chrome in Chrome 12. In its place it’s implemented support for application caches to replace Gears’ offline features, replaced Gears Database API with an IndexedDB API that its “friends at Mozilla and Microsoft” – yeah, it really said that – collaborated on, substituted a File API for Gears’ Blob functionality and implemented the geolocation, notifications and web worker APIs in Gears natively in Chrome.

Schmidt Could Get Commerce Job: Bloomberg

Sun, 13 Mar 2011 13:00:00 EDT

Google’s outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt, who’s supposed to step down next month in favor of Google founder Larry Page, may get to scratch his well-known political itch. Bloomberg says the Obama White House may consider him to replace Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, who will be nominated to go to China as US ambassador. Bloomberg cited “a person familiar with the process” as its source and said Pfizer CEO Jeffrey Kindler could also be under consideration. Schmidt will become executive chairman of Google in April. He was at that dinner at John Doerr’s house last month with Barack Obama and Steve Jobs.

Tape Salvages Gmail Disaster

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:00:00 EST

Late Monday Google said that the bug that ate multiple copies of people’s Gmail Sunday in multiple Google data centers – erasing years of e-mails, attachments, folders, chat logs, all-important contact lists and personalized settings – was created by an otherwise unidentified defect in a storage software update and that the only thing that ultimately saved the situation was old-fashioned tape back-ups. Google engineering VP and 24x7 site reliability czar Ben Trenor explained: “Imagine the sinking feeling of logging in to your Gmail account and finding it empty. That’s what happened to 0.02% of Gmail users yesterday, and we’re very sorry. The good news is that email was never lost and we’ve restored access for many of those affected. Though it may take longer than we originally expected, we’re making good progress and things should be back to normal for everyone soon.

‘Anonymous’ Hacks Investigative Agency

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:58:00 EST

‘Anonymous’ outdid itself once again and hacked the very agency that is investigating it. Security firm HBGary Federal had its Twitter, LinkedIn and email accounts of COO Ted Vera hacked. ‘Anonymous’ posted the information online, including the text of over 60,000 company emails. Read the full article at CNet.com

The Tau Index & Revolution: Who's Next? (Update)

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 07:45:00 EST

In Cairo, fear and trepidation of Facebook and Twitter ran high enough to prompt the government to flip a Liebermanesque Internet kill switch. But perhaps it's not these two sites in particular as much as IT in general that's causing the problem for the world's dictators. And perhaps it is those countries that have tried to have things both ways—encouraging economic freedom while controlling political freedom—that are most prone to disruption, even revolution, today. Disruptive Stuff Countries that have moved from state planning to more open markets have experienced widespread disruption as the inequalities of capitalism announce themselves. When a country moving toward economic liberalization doesn't liberalize its press and political freedoms in the process, oppressed anger often builds to dangerous levels. Add to this the notion that IT is disruptive, even revolutionary, and you can be crafting a toxic brew. Through Internet connectivity, small computers, smart phones, and a universe of free websites, people in all corners of the world can communicate in ways that were simply not possible even a few years ago, and with opinions that will invariably run afoul of an oppressive, controlling government. IT disruption cannot be measured accurately simply by looking at pure investment levels. In fact, the wealthier, more equitable, more stable nations of the world also invest the most on IT on a per-person (per capita) basis: Switzerland, the United States, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands are the world's top five.. The next five are Hong Kong, Finland, Denmark, the UAE, and the UK. After that come Japan and Canada. All have internal problems, pressures, and loudmouths, of course, but none seem ripe for revolution. Where, on the other hand, are the places that are truly dynamic—truly kinetic—in their level of commitment to IT? Which countries may be most prone to truly disruptive IT? This was my question when I created the Tau Index a few months ago, in which I factored income inequity and local cost-of-living into per capita IT spending. Doing this created a Top 25 list that was far different from the simple Top 25 per capita list. There were only two countries in the Top 25 of both lists: the Czech Republic and South Korea. And whereas most of the world's Top 25 IT spenders per capita are located in North America and Western Europe (plus Japan), most members of the Tau Index were located in Southern Asia, Eastern Europe, and Northern Africa. Combustibility There are some combustible places on this list. So given the revolutionary events in Tunisia and Egypt—both of which are on the Tau Index Top 25--it occurred to me to examine an extra dimension, one that measures government oppression. For now, I've settled on the Press Freedom Index (PFI), published annually by Reporters Without Borders. Although some places rate poorly due to a general climate of fear and lawlessness rather than government oppression—the Philippines, a Tau Index Top 25 country, is the classic example—we can generally connect the dots between a poor PFI ranking and a nasty government. I then connected the dots between high Tau Index ratings and poor PFI rankings—between the most kinetic (ie,disruptive) IT environments and the most restrictive media environments. Doing so resulted in a list that, not surprisingly, includes Egypt and Tunisia. Integrating their Tau Index rating with their Press Freedom Index rating puts them in a red zone of sorts that, in retrospect, may have been a good indicator that revolution was ripe. Who's Next? The big question then becomes, if this connection is meaningful, who's next? I've already tweeted the names of a few places that fared badly in this latest Tau Index view. Some were expected, but others not. I'll demur from listing them here, as I do more research into what is happening in those countries. Certainly, we all should abhor violence and the incitement thereof. Revolutionary talk is dangerous talk, and words do have consequences. The prediction business is also a very imprecise business, and one to be taken very seriously when it comes to predicting revolution. But the Tau Index components—per capita IT spending, Gini coefficient, and GDP PPP per capita—are all public knowledge, as is the Press Freedom Index. So anyone can pursue this path on their own if they wish. Or contact me if you'd like to discuss.

No Internet Kill Switch Perhaps, But Internet Buzzkill To Be Sure

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 07:15:00 EST

There's a marvelous scene in the 1969 movie, Midnight Cowboy, in which the Dustin Hoffman character, “Ratso” Rizzo, starving, starts filling his pockets with food from a lavish buffet at a party that he's crashed. A young woman tells him, “You don't have to steal the food. It's free,” to which he responds, “Well, if it's free, then I'm not stealing it!” The reality was that Ratso, or Rico as he preferred to be called, was stealing the food. This exchange reminds me of the renewed efforts by Sens. Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins, with what I assume is the tacit approval of the Obama Administration, to introduce a cybersecurity bill that has been widely tagged as “the Internet kill switch bill.” This terminology is inaccurate, as the powers granted to the President by this proposed legislation are specific in nature, and don't grant the power to disable all Internet connectivity in the US. A mouthpiece for the Senate committee involved with this bill (currently known as S. 3480) has been quoted as saying “we're not trying to mandate any requirements for the entire Internet...but only to assert governmental control over those "crucial components that form our nation's critical infrastructure." Where's the Logic? But why bother with granting new, specific powers? The President, you see, already has general powers to shut down “any (communications) station or facility” under the Communications Act of 1934. So why does he need additional, specific powers to create a list of websites that he can shut down after declaring certain types of emergency? The thinking seems to run like this: Smart people: You don't need control over the Internet, because you already have it. Dumb senators: Well, if we already have control, then we're not trying to get it. Maybe I have the wrong analogy. Maybe this is more worthy of Yogi Berra or Kafka. Another Freaking List The key aspect of this proposed legislation is not cybersecurity in general, but rather its granting the power to create a list of sites that would come under its purview. Creation of yet another “list” by the Federal government should chill the spines of anyone who remembers J. Edgar Hoover's FBI lists, President Richard Nixon's enemies list, and who-knows-what lists that have been created by the Federal government since 9/11. One woulc also hope that the list envisioned in this bill is somewhat more accurate than the risible advisory and no-fly lists that have emerged within the air transportation industry since 9/11. Part of the plan here is apparently to include IT systems connected to things such as nuclear power plants as worthy of a Presidential shutdown. To wit, the bill in its current proposed form states that a facility would come under jurisdiction here if it had “the potential for the destruction or disruption of the system or asset to cause a mass casualty event which includes an extraordinary number of fatalities.” Where Does it Begin & End? Seems like a worthy enough goal. But it would also cover disruption of a system that would cause “mass economic consequences.” What are these? Banking sites? Airline sites? Google? Ebay? Facebook? Where does this list begin and where does it end? I would wager that any business that finds itself under a serious cyberattack would have the wherewithal to recognize this and shut things down on its own if circumstances warranted. The last thing they would need is a bumbling Federal bureaucracy making a bumbling decision for a business about which it knows nothing—and there are pages and pages of bureaucratic process talk in S. 3480. We can also be sure that if this bill makes it through the Senate, then through the House, then through a Presidential signature, it will be continuously amended over time to grant ever more powers to a Presidential office that already has plenty of them. And guess what, a true Internet kill switch will be one of those powers some day. It'll be like Rico crashing a number of parties to steal ever more free food.

UK Police Arrest Five Anonymous Hacktivists

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 10:55:00 EST

In a coordinated 7am raid Thursday morning British bobbies swooped down on houses in London and towns around the country and arrested five men and boys suspected of being part of Anonymous, the loose international coalition that last year unleashed distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on companies such as PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and PostFinance for refusing to handle payments to the cable-leaking WikiLeaks site and its organizer Julian Assange.

Google’s Hiring

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 10:15:00 EST

To chase and catch the elusive goddess, Innovation, and fend off clever rivals, Google means to hire 6,200 people this year, which would represent roughly another 25% increase in its workforce after last year’s, more than it ever has before. Where it’s going to hire these people is unclear other than “across the board and around the globe.” Google’s still-CEO-for-the-moment Eric Schmidt said Tuesday in a speech that the company will hire ~1,000 people in Europe. The company gets something like a million applications a year but promising pre-IPO start-ups like Facebook have proven good at raiding established Google folk. Wall Street apparently wishes Google would be more circumspect in its spending. It recently gave all its staff a loyalty-buying 10% raise.

Are Page Speed and YSlow Too Static?

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 11:00:00 EST

Some of the best web performance tools are still largely being run as browser plug-ins. If those tools can make the leap to becoming real-time and can be made to consider user context, the industry will have something truly powerful on its hands. Initiatives like Yahoo’s YSlow and Google’s Page Speed were pioneers that broke new ground in the understanding of web performance. They have both garnered large communities and acted as a catalyst for the Velocity conference. For those that are not familiar with these tools, they are amazing browser plug-ins that evaluate the design of a page as it is being loaded by the browser and then assign a score to that page (YSlow uses a scale from A to F, whereas Page Speed uses a numeric scale from 0 to 100). Both of these tools have, at their heart, a series of scoring rules based on accepted best practices for the design of high performance web pages.

DOJ May Block Google’s ITA Acquisition

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 05:00:00 EST

Bloomberg followed by the Wall Street Journal said Thursday that the Justice Department is working on an antitrust suit to stop Google’s $700 million acquisition of ITA Software, which provides online flight and ticket information to popular Internet booking sites. It would be the second time the DOJ has run up antitrust papers challenging Google’s plans. It previously derailed a Google-Yahoo advertising pact. Both Bloomberg and the Journal say the DOJ isn’t sure yet whether it will actually try to stay the ITA acquisition. Google triggered DOJ lawyers into wetting their pencils over Christmas when it demanded last month to know in 30 days whether the deal would be sanctioned or not. The deal was announced last July. Microsoft, Expedia, Sabre and others oppose the deal.

Chrome Drops H.264

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 11:00:00 EST

Google is dropping support for H.264 from its Chrome browser in favor of WebM, its own open source, royalty-free codec, as well as the Xiph.org Foundation’s Theora widgetry because they’re open source and the currently free but patent-bearing H.264, arguably the web’s video standard, ain’t. Google blogged that “We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.”

Assange Due Back in Court

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 01:30:00 EST

Julian Assange, fresh from his Christmas house arrest in an English country mansion owned by his new BFF Vaughan Smith, is supposed to show up in a London magistrate’s court Tuesday morning British time to sort out the evidence ahead of his two-day extradition hearing next month. Assange is fighting to avoid extradition to Sweden for questioning on allegations of rape.

Skype to Buy Qik: Report

Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:45:00 EST

Skype is reportedly buying Qik, which lets users stream video from their smartphone, for $150 million including earnout. Business Insider, which broke the story, points out that both companies count Marc Andreessen and his partner Ben Horowitz as backers. Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff has a piece of Qik too. Apparently Qik’s user base last year soared from 600,000 to five million people, nosed along by partners like Sprint, T-Mobile, Nokia and Samsung. Business Insider says Qik is considered the best video streaming option for Android.

[Update 1] OSI Protests Sale of Novell Patents to Microsoft & Friends

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 06:00:00 EST

A spooked Open Source Initiative (OSI), the entity that blesses open source licenses, has written to the German Federal Cartel Office (FCO) asking the regulator to investigate the proposed $450 million sale of 882 Novell patents to CPTN Holdings LLC, the Microsoft-organized consortium. The deal is a key part of the $2.2 billion sale of Novell to Attachmate.

The Impact of Airport X-Ray Technologies - Part 1

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 08:00:00 EST

With all the commotion recently regarding the airports new back-scatter x-ray machines,(privacy, health etc.) I wanted a first hand look/feel at this experience. While I am sensitive to and an advocate for issues of privacy regarding persons with medical conditions and children, the privacy/ 4th amendment arguments is not an issue for me; at fifteen pounds overweight I don’t think any airport security personnel will take pleasure at looking at a scanned image of me. Far from it I hope I don’t give them any nightmares.

Paul Allen Sues Android for Patent Infringement

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 07:45:00 EST

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen refiled his patent infringement suit Tuesday against AOL, Apple, eBay, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo and YouTube – the one that the court tossed out on December 10 for lack of detail – like exactly which products he’s talking about. He just made the court’s refiling deadline and one of the many, many things he claims infringe the patents he holds by virtue of having started and funded Interval Research back in 1992 is Android, everybody’s favorite patent-infringing punching bag these days. Well, allegedly patent-infringing punching bag at any rate but patent watcher Florian Mueller says he’s taking Allen’s chances seriously because “he can really show an involvement with early Internet innovation,” which lowers the odds of someone trotting in with some patent-busting prior art and increases Allen’s statute as a “legitimate inventor rather than a troll if and when it comes to whether or not he’s entitled to an injunction.”

Bank of America Bans WikiLeaks

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 11:45:00 EST

Bank of America has stopped processing payments meant for WikiLeaks. It issued a statement saying that it “joins in the actions previously announced by MasterCard, PayPal, Visa Europe and others and will not process transactions of any type that we have reason to believe are intended for WikiLeaks.