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This blog library reflects the newest and most current information related to the many facets of intergovernmental technology. Content will be added to and updated on a daily basis.

The Data Breach Blog

A desktop computer, containing the personal information of current and former students of Virginia Commonwealth University, was recently stolen from a school library.

How many victims? 17,214.

What type of personal information? Names, Social Security numbers and test scores dating from October 2005 to the present.

What happened? The computer was part of a scanning system used to score tests and record grades for many university classes. It was stolen from a secure area — in a locked area within a locked room — at Cabell Library in mid-Arpil. It was discovered missing less than a day after the theft.

Campus police know who stole the computer but have been unable to recover it. Mark Willis, VCU’s chief information officer, told the Richmond Times Dispatch the computer was taken for personal use and then disposed of.

The computer was thrown away and not sold, Lepley said.

Details: Up until January 2007, VCU used Social Security numbers as school identification numbers.
22,500 additional students are being notified that their names and test scores may have been on the computer. No Social Security numbers were recorded with those names, but computer-generated student ID numbers may have been.

What was the response? VCU is offering one year free identity-theft insurance to affected individuals. The case has been turned over to the commonwealth’s attorney’s office.

Self-Service Can Leave Customers Feeling Empty

The thing about anything involving self-service is that it's not usually particularly gratifying. And yet, all over the Web we see companies trying to reduce their customer support costs by deploying self-service applications that are all basically designed to keep the customers from having to interact with anybody. In terms of selling customers additional products and services, not to mention building affinity, self-service applications are all too often a wasted opportunity.

That's what makes a new software-as-a-service offering called Helpstream pretty compelling idea. Instead of deploying a bunch of static content around a basic bulletin board system, Helpstream lets organizations create a full-fledged online community that not only allows customers representatives engage with customers, it lets the customers easily engage with each other.

The end result of this approach is not only can the company deliver better customer support at a relatively low cost; it can also dramatically increase affinity and more easily sell additional products.

It's been said that the phone is the worse thing that ever happened to customer service. The whole model of delivering service over the phone encourages companies to limit their interactions with customers to try and keep support costs down. The Web offers a new way of interacting with customers that allows companies to rethink how they engage with customers. Unfortunately, far too many of them still think they're running a call center rather than managing a community where people are looking to establish meaningful relationships.

Backup and Recovery Via the Cloud

When it comes to cloud computing in the enterprise, the first place this approach makes the most sense is the backup and recovery process.

After all, backup and recovery is a thankless task that requires a lot of additional infrastructure that more the most part sits idle. At a time when the finance department is screaming for ways to cut IT costs, moving the back up and recovery function into the cloud makes a lot of sense.

As a result, there are any number of storage vendors and IT service providers delivering backup and recovery services via the cloud. But the question that IT organizations need to ask is whether those services were specifically designed for the cloud or are have backup and recovery service providers simply taken older client/server approaches to backup and recovery and redeployed them on the Web.

Asigra argues that backup and recovery solutions that were not specifically designed for cloud computing are fundamentally flawed. Asigra maintains that the best approach to backup and recovery in the cloud requires a hybrid approach that relies on local backup and recovery software that is tightly coupled to a cloud service. That local piece of software is not only able to manage the process; it also handles de-duplication tasks and inventories the entire environment. As a result, the amount of data that needs to be actually shipped into the cloud service for backup is minimized and only the delta changes to the data itself need be backed up after the initial setup of the service.

All of this is accomplished without introducing agents into the environment because the local Asigra is able to manage the process by integrated with the existing backup capabilities already present in the environment, versus adding another layer of backup and recovery management software on every machine that needs to be backed up.

Asigra points out that other backup and recovery tools were designed in an ear where vendors wanted customers to eat up as much storage capacity as possible. Designed specifically as a service, Asigra says its approach minimizes the amount of data that needs to travel back and forth across the wide area network link to its service.

Furthermore, Asigra then indexes all that data to help speed the recovery process. Repurposing technology built for one style of computing into another era is never usually a good idea. It can usually be made to definitely work, but overhead associated with making it work usually means that it quickly becomes more trouble than it's worth.

A New Defintion of IT Value

One of the more apparent themes of this latest downturn is that IT organizations have shifted their priorities from building new things to fixing many of the things they have already built.

If you peel back the list of priorities gleaned from just about any survey out there, it's clear that IT organizations are trying to get more value out of what they have. Case in point is the adoption of virtualization to increase server utilization and a lot of focus on application and data center renewal projects.

This creates a challenge for vendors selling new wares unless they can emphasize some part of their product portfolio that actually helps customers get more value of their existing IT investments. Case in point would be Precise, a spinoff from Symantec, focused on helping customers get more performance out their transaction processing systems while simultaneously lowering the total cost of ownership associated with those types of systems. What the system basically does is track all the elements of the transaction system and alerts customers when an imbalance starts to lead to performance degradation. Considering the delicate nature of these systems, that kind of alert can save a company hundreds of thousands of dollars.

What makes customers a little more receptive to this kind of product is that the vendor in question is not asking anybody to fork over millions of dollars to fund some type of forklift upgrade. Anybody can prove that by spending some money now, customers can save money later. The problem is that a lot of customers don't have any significant amount of money to spend up front in the first place.

So maybe the question that vendors should be asking themselves is how can vendors help customers get more value out of what they have today, instead of asking them to fund IT projects based on new technologies wrapped in theoretical returns on investments? Some day soon the economy will recover. But until then, customers have a limited appetite for the next big new thing. What they really want are a lot of small things that add up to a big amount of value.

Visa Introduces a Credit Card on a Phone

I wrote last week about a way to make your cellphone work like a credit card by applying a sticker to the back. The sticker, equipped with a radio frequency identification, or R.F.I.D., tag lets you wave the phone over a terminal to make a purchase.

Visa is introducing a cellphone payment system that is more than sticker-thin. The service is currently available only in Malaysia, but it will be expanded to other countries in coming years.

Like some phone payment schemes already used in Japan, the Visa service uses a chip on the phone to communicate with a payment terminal. But the latest version is based on a global standard for phones and telephones called near field communications.

Are Minds Really Like Computers?

Today’s idea: Some people use the metaphor of the mind as a computer in promoting the idea that a mind can be replicated on a computer. It’s dubious comparison, a writer says. A mind of its own? Technology | Promoters of artificial intelligence regularly describe the mind and brain as the “software and hardware” of thinking, writes Ari N. Schulman, an editor of the technology-and-ethics journal The New Atlantis. Also, they describe senses as “inputs” and behaviors as “outputs,” neurons as “processing units” and synapses as “circuitry.”

But this brain-as-computer metaphor doesn’t hold up when you examine the actual workings of computers, Schulman says. So proponents thus may be engaging in wishful thinking or misleading people about the possibilities of artificial intelligence — from computer therapy programs that replace your real-life shrink to robotic pets. [New Atlantis]

Electronic Spy Network Focused on Dalai Lama and Embassy Computers

An electronic spy network that has infiltrated the computers of government offices, NGOs and activist groups in more than 100 countries has been surreptitiously stealing documents and eavesdropping on electronic correspondence, say a group of researchers at the University of Toronto.

More than 1,200 computers at embassies, foreign ministries, news media outlets and non-governmental organizations based primarily in South and Southeast Asia have been infiltrated by the network since at least the spring of 2007, according to the researchers' detailed 53-page report, as have computers in the offices of the Dalai Lama, the Asian Development Bank and the Associated Press in the United Kingdom and Hong Kong.

Infected computers include the ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, and the Philippines and embassies of India, South Korea, Germany, Pakistan and Taiwan. Thirty percent of the infected computers could be considered "high-value" diplomatic, political, economic and military targets, the researchers say. Forensic evidence for the network tracks to servers in China, though the researchers are cautious about assigning responsibility to the Chinese government.

The largest number of infected computers in a single country were in Taiwan (148), followed by Vietnam (130) and the U.S. (113). Seventy-nine computers were infected at the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA). One computer at Deloitte & Touche in New York was among those infected in the U.S.

Although the network didn't appear to have infiltrated any U.S. government computers, a NATO computer was spied on at one point, as were computers at the Indian Embassy in Washington and the permanent mission of Cuba to the United Nations.

According to a story about the research in the New York Times, the researchers began investigating the issue in June 2008 after the Dalai Lama's office in Dharamsala, India -- the location of the Tibetan government in exile -- contacted them to examine its computers, which were exhibiting signs of infection. They found that the spy network had gained control of mail servers for the Dalai Lama's offices, allowing the spies to intercept all correspondence.

The computers were infected either after workers clicked on an e-mail attachment containing malware or clicked on a URL that took them to a rogue web site where the malware downloaded to their computer. The malware includes a feature for turning on the web camera and microphone on a computer in order to secretly record conversations and activity in a room.

The spy network continues to infect about a dozen new computers in various places each week, according to the researchers, who are based at the University of Toronto's Munk Center for International Studies. The Times has a graph showing countries where computers have been infected.

The researchers say three of the four main servers controlling the network, which they've dubbed GhostNet (the malware used in the attack is the gh0st RAT program), are based on the island of Hainan in China. The fourth is based in Southern California. The language of the interface for controlling the network of infected computers is Chinese.

None of this proves that the Chinese government is behind the spying, as the researchers point out in their report, since it's possible for an intelligence agency for the U.S. or any other country to set up a spy network in a way that would throw suspicions on the Chinese. But the Times reports a couple of incidents that suggest Chinese intelligence services might be behind the spying. In one incident, after the Dalai Lama's office sent an e-mail to an unnamed foreign diplomat inviting her for a meeting, the Chinese government contacted her and discouraged her from accepting the invitation. Chinese intelligence officers also showed another woman who works with Tibetan exiles transcripts of her electronic communications. The Chinese government has denied it's behind the spy network.

The Times doesn't mention this, but I suspect the spy network is related to an issue that Threat Level reported in 2007 involving a Swedish researcher named Dan Egerstad who found documents and login and password information for dozens of embassy workers and political rights groups in Asia, including the office of the Dalai Lama, being leaked over a Tor network.

Feds Want Your Help With Broadband Policy

There's a bandwidth gap between the United States and the rest of the developed world that President Obama wants closed, and the feds are about to ask for help devising a plan to catch up to the Japans of the world. Epicenter will make it easy for you to be heard. The FCC announced Thursday that at its next open meeting, April 8, it will discuss a notice of inquiry (.pdf) — essentially an open call for comment on what the government's role, if any, should be in making the country richly wired and unwired. From there the FCC will draw out a broadband road-map report — due to Congress in less than a year under the rules of the stimulus package. From there, the money might really begin to flow.

The drive is part of Obama's tech agenda, which calls for America to lead the world in internet access with "true broadband in every community in America [and] better use of the nation's wireless spectrum."It's a noble goal, but one that's unlikely to happen without some change.Broadband in Britain, Ireland, France, Japan and Korea is faster, cheaper and more popular than in the States. That's due to complicated regulatory, geographic, historical and economic issues. Or, it's because telecoms are greedy, it's too risky to bet billions on fiber, or the government hasn't funded needed infrastructure since the net went commercial in the early 1990s. It depends on who you talk to.One thing's clear — something is likely to change in how the feds fund, tax and subsidize IP-based communications. There's already $8 billion or so set aside to fund rural broadband programs. Here's your chance to weigh in. Epicenter will bundle up the best and most popular ideas and submit them to the FCC once it opens its calls for comments. Submit and vote as much as you like, though you can only submit a new idea every 15 minutes.

The battle over cybersecurity

There’s a bureaucratic wrestling match going on over which piece of the federal government will get to handle cybersecurity.

Here’s the gist, gleaned from Wired and Forbes‘ coverage: On one side of the ring, there’s the National Security Agency, which is known for its extreme secrecy and its program to wiretap phone conversations of Americans.

On the other, there’s the Department of Homeland Security, which now manages computer security. The head of the department’s computer security branch resigned last week, complaining that the NSA is trying to steal control of the program.

In his resignation letter to the Department of Homeland Security and in an interview with Forbes on Monday, Rod Beckstrom said consolidating the cybersecurity program under the NSA would put too much power in one agency’s hands. Privacy groups are concerned about the NSA taking over the program because of how it handled secret wiretaps of phone conversations.

But the idea does have support. Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair told Congress that the NSA should be in charge rather than Homeland Security.

Cybersecurity is a huge issue — especially since technology is often outpacing our ability to understand all of the implications. Many people want to see a solution that improves security without chilling innovation and openness on the Internet — or infringing on privacy. Others see most any attempt at increased security to be needed.

This post is just a primer, so please weigh in on this issue in the comments. How far should government go to make our computers secure? And which agency should handle that?

Business Continuity as a Systems Development issue.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research

I was rather interested by a press release from the Chartered Management Institute (CMI) today, about its 'A Decade of Living Dangerously' report (published by the CMI and Cabinet Office). It points out the usual failures in Business Continuity Management (BCM); which is, as I see it, an aspect of Corporate Governance (and it relates to IT governance, since most businesses depend on software these days). Just three of many failings identified are:

Poor protection: just 38% have a plan in place to cope with disruption and 1 in 3 don't bother testing plans if they have them
Weathering the storm: 35% of business are worried about extreme weather, but just 16% of organisations have plans in place to continue work in poor weather
Possessions not people: Employers in the manufacturing sector seem more concerned with protecting physical assets such as IT (30%) than they do their people (17%).
But why am I interested in all this, as a Practice Leader for Development, which means IT systems development, at Bloor? Well, because I think businesses want us to develop holistic business systems these days, not just pieces of software. This isn't to say that IT developers should do everything but they should look at the "business outcomes" when designing an automated system. So, in the context of the above points:

The analysis for a new automated system should look at the associated risk profile, associated with its use in the business. If it is "business critical", existing business continuity procedures should be reviewed and changed requirements (or increased risks) flagged to the appropriate people. If extreme weather is a recognised risk to the operation of the business, then perhaps a system design should take account of this and design in a capability for (well-governed) home and distributed working. The model for an automated system must include the manual (people-based) processes around the automated process—if a business outcome is to be guaranteed. For instance, if the design of a financial system is well-secured in a technical sense—strong encryption, robust identity management and so on—then criminals will be forced to target the people involved (we've already seen cases of managers' families being taken hostage and used to force someone to give them access). Unless the system design includes coercion procedures and similar provisions, that discourage the targeting of people, the system's security is compromised (not least because if you are seen to be putting staff at risk, they will soon stop taking your security policies seriously).

Twitter in Local Government, "Reality Mining," Light Rail, and more

Over the course of any day, people congregate around different parts of a city. In the morning hours, workers commute downtown, while at lunchtime and in the evening, people disperse to eateries and bars.

While this sort of behavior is common knowledge, it hasn't been visible to the average person. Sense Networks, a startup based in New York, is now trying to bring this side of a city to life. Using cell-phone and taxi GPS data, the startup's software produces a heat map that shows activity at hot spots across a city. Currently, the service, called Citysense, only works in San Francisco, but it will launch in New York in the next few months.

On Wednesday, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference in San Jose, CA, Tony Jebara, chief scientist for Sense Networks and a professor at Columbia University, detailed plans of a forthcoming update to Citysense that shows not only where people are gathering in real time, but where people with similar behavioral patterns--students, tourists, or businesspeople, for instance--are congregating. A user downloads Citysense to her phone to view the map and can choose whether or not to allow the application to track her own location.

Unisys starts global forum for government, IT executives

Unisys Corp. has created a global forum to bring together leaders from government and the information technology industry to share ideas and best practices and discuss government operations.

The Center for Government Innovation will target government executives and IT professionals who can share ideas and experiences, learn about best practices in technology innovation and discuss the business and operation of government, according to a Unisys announcement today.

Although initially focused primarily on issues related to U.S. federal, state and local governments, Unisys officials say they expect the center will eventually address issues that cross the boundaries of regional and national governments.

The center will serve as a think tank and as a vehicle for research programs, white papers, webinars and executive roundtables on public sector management and technology issues.

In addition, the center will sponsor and conduct primary research in green computing, cybersecurity, physical security, secure information sharing, health IT, law enforcement and justice, enabling transparency in government, energy management, cloud computing and other emerging issues.

The center’s inaugural white paper focuses on identifying the “Government of the Future.” Issues covered in the report include the shift of workforce talent, the pervasiveness of security concerns and the changing political landscape.

ETech 2009: Criminals are 'targeting basic blocks of the internet'
Computer security expert says industry has failed to protect users - and now the chickens could be coming home to roost

It seems barely a week goes by without some serious security breach online, a case of identity theft or a huge hacking attack. According to one security expert, though, we've barely scratched the surface.

In a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in San Jose this afternoon, Alex Stamos – a co-founder of security group iSEC Partners - said that we should start expecting online criminals to strike at some of the fundamental parts of the internet.

"Basic infrastructure failure is what we're going to see over the next few years," he said.

"The most interesting research is either taking things that we thought were unexploitable and exploiting them, and also the breaking of the basic building blocks of the internet from the 1970s and 1980s."

These things are already happening, he said, pointing to examples like the DNS cache poisoning attack demonstrated by researcher Dan Kaminsky, and the flaws in the widely-used MD5 hash that were exposed late last year.

Stamos, whose company works with clients like Microsoft and Google, said that nobody – including computer security companies – had properly got their heads around the way that problems need to be dealt with.

"Security as an industry is failing," he said. "While computers get better, security gets worse."

The basic problems, he said were that many security protocols date from before the internet age – while the traditional ways of verifying identity (like knowing your mother's maiden name) were now irrelevant in the post-privacy world of Facebook.

And even if those things were fixed, he warned, the police are faced with a widespread inability to catch the criminals responsible and prosecute them across international borders.

Although Stamos admitted that law enforcement had improved drastically over the last decade – and that they were highly proficient in the sort of long-term, undercover sting investigations that have netted internet criminals in the past – he also said that international laws made the situation almost impossible.

"Hackers 10 or 15 years ago didn't know how to monetise what they stole: now we've had the mixing of eastern European crime gangs and western hackers to do things, steal identities and make money from it."

His suggestions to fix things?

- Change the model of disclosing bugs and then issuing security patches, which doesn't work to protect users.

- Work more openly; change the business of security so that people aren't focused on getting publicity and business from discovering and exploiting each other's mistakes for profit

- And, perhaps, simply stop letting users do things that might be dangerous - rather than inundate them with information that they aren't qualified to understand.

"The ugly truth of where we are today is that the vast majority of people cannot use the internet safely," he said. "That's totally unfortunate, but it's also totally true and it's a truth that's going to catch up with us."

The Broadband Gap: Why Do They Have More Fiber?
By SAUL HANSELL
This is the third in a series looking at the lessons for the United States from broadband deployment in other countries. Read the first and second posts.

Broadband is cheaper in many other countries than in the United States.

“You have a pretty uncompetitive market by European standards,” said Tim Johnson, the chief analyst at Point-Topic, a London consulting firm.

Other countries have lower costs for the same reasons their DSL service is faster. Dense urban areas reduce some of the cost of building networks. In addition, governments in some countries subsidized fiber networks.

But the big difference between the United States and most other countries is competition.

“Now hold on there,” you might say to me. Since I wrote that many countries don’t have cable systems and the bulk of broadband is run by way of DSL through existing phone wires, how can there be competition? Aren’t those owned by monopoly phone companies?

True enough. But most big countries have devised a system to create competition by forcing the phone companies to share their lines and facilities with rival Internet providers.

Not surprisingly, the phone companies hate this idea, often called unbundling, and tend to drag their feet when it is introduced. So it requires rather diligent regulators to force the telcos to play fair. And the effect of this scheme depends a lot on details of what equipment is shared and at what prices.

Britain has gone the furthest, forcing BT Group to split off a unit that operates the actual network and sells to various voice and Internet providers, including its own telephone service, on an equal basis.

The United States was early with this sort of approach, requiring telephone companies to allow rival Internet service providers to sell DSL service using their networks. The way these rules were written, however, meant the wholesale cost was so high that providers like AOL and Earthlink couldn’t offer a better deal than the telcos themselves.

And the plan was largely abandoned in 2003 by the Federal Communications Commission on the theory that the country is better served by encouraging competition for Internet service between cable companies and phone companies.

The commission has a point that there is something rather forced and artificial about creating competition to resell what is essentially the same service. It’s like a supermarket that sells six different brands of peanut butter, all made with the same recipe in the same factory. Sometimes broadband providers try to create unusual price bundles or nice add-on features, and in some countries they use different underlying networks. But Internet providers that share the same line to their customers’ home will very often be more the same than different.

Unbundling can be seen as a slightly disguised form of price regulation. Profits dropped. Many of the new entrants have found it difficult to build sustainable businesses, while margins for the incumbent phone companies have been squeezed as well.

It’s not exactly clear, however, that this approach is in the public’s long-term interest. Phone companies have less incentive to invest and upgrade their networks if they are going to be forced to share their networks.

Some argue that this is the main reason that there is little investment in bringing fiber to homes in Europe. “Investing in fiber is a huge risk,” Kalyan Dasgupta, a London-based consultant with LECG, wrote me in an e-mail, “and the prospect of taking that risk alone, but having to ’share’ the rewards with other players, is not a prospect that most rational businesses would consider.”

Britain, which has been the biggest proponent of line sharing, has decided to deregulate the wholesale price BT can charge for fiber, so long as it doesn’t favor its own brand of Internet service.

Japan faced a similar problem after several years where regulation forced NTT, the incumbent phone company, to sell access to its lines to rival Internet providers at low prices. In order to get NTT to invest in a faster network, the government set a much more attractive price for sharing access to its new fiber lines.

Restoring some form of line sharing is one of the biggest issues facing the F.C.C. Without it, or some other way to increase competition, the oligopolistic nature of the market in the United States may well keep broadband prices well above the rates for similar service in the rest of the world. At the same time, the commission is looking to expand broadband access to rural areas and speed the deployment of higher speeds, so it may not want to slash telco profits if it will also slow investment.

Google Voice: Now You Can Read Your Voice Mails

Google late Wednesday introduced Google Voice, a service that lets Google users store transcripts of text and voice-mail phone messages in Gmail and then be able to search those messages.
The new feature is based on the technology of GrandCentral Communications, which Google acquired in 2007, and positions Google opposite both Internet phone providers like eBay's Skype and traditional phone services.

"The new application improves the way you use your phone," said Google Voice product managers Craig Walker, Vincent Paquet and Wesley Chan in a Wednesday night post to the Google blog. "You can get transcripts of your voice mail and archive and search all of the SMS text messages you receive. You can also use the service to make low-priced international calls and easily access Goog-411 directory assistance."

The original GrandCentral design gave users a universal phone number to route calls to home, office and cell phones, and Google has preserved that functionality in Google Voice. The updates are in new Google speech-recognition technology that integrates Google's Goog-411 telephone directory service to automatically transcribe voice mails into text that can then be saved in Gmail or forwarded as SMS text messages.

A user can make calls via the Internet for free in the U.S. and call internationally for a small fee. Some of Google voice's features, including voice-mail transcription, also require a fee through Spinvox, Phone Tag and other start-ups, according to The New York Times.

The Times reported that international calls to land lines through Google Voice are "marginally cheaper" than Skype, but calls to international mobile devices are up to a third cheaper.

Some of the additional features, as described on the Google Voice home page include call screening, listen-in, call blocking, greeting personalization, the ability to forward and download voice mails, conference calling, call record, phone switch for calls in progress, and the ability to view your inbox from a mobile device.

According to Google, only current GrandCentral users can start using the feature immediately. Walker, Paquet and Chan wrote in the blog post that Google Voice will be rolled out for public consumption "soon," and set up an e-mail notification for updates.

Google and GrandCentral representatives told the Times and other news services Wednesday they don't see Google Voice as a threat to Skype or the AT&Ts and Verizons of the world, and don't plan for Google Voice to carrying Google's advertising platform.

"We can generate enough revenue from international calling to support the service," said Paquet, also GrandCentral's founder, to the Times.

A New Place for Clean, Green Tech News
By VINDU GOEL

For a while now, Bits readers may have noticed links to posts from our sister blog, Green Inc., which covers the business of energy and the environment, including many stories of interest to technology readers.

On Wednesday, The New York Times launched a new section of the Web site, called Energy & Environment, devoted entirely to news about those topics.

As Tom Zeller Jr., the editor of Green Inc., put it in a blog post introducing the new section: “With the recent passage of a $787 billion economic stimulus package — one loaded with incentives for everything from alternative energy and building efficiency upgrades to electric vehicles and biofuels — creating a centralized location from which to monitor the front lines of ‘green’ seems more important than ever.”

We will continue to cross-post the energy-related stories and blog posts of the greatest interest to technology readers on the Technology page and here in Bits. But for those of you who want to dive more deeply into those topics, we encourage you to check out the new page.

Avoiding Accidental Architectures

As the economy worsens and traditional software vendors get better at delivering more robust software-as-a-service offerings, the potential for creating costly accidental application architectures is rising.

The issue is that, as the economy continues to worsen, interest in SaaS applications is on the rise because IT organizations are trying to transform IT from being a capital expense into an operational expense that is more likely to gain support from senior business leaders.

The challenge, however, is the integration issue that having a SaaS application running outside the firewall creates in terms of sharing data with existing on premise applications. In the rush to embrace SaaS, not enough IT organizations are taking a strategic approach to enterprise application architecture. As a result, they are in danger of creating unwieldy, expensive accidental software architectures.

This is a fundamental argument that Oracle, IBM and SAP are making at the expense of companies such as Salesforce.com. They argue that instead of thinking of integration as a system or data level issue, the real issue is to integrate business processes at a higher level. Using this approach they argue that customers can mitigate a lot of the integration costs associated with integrating diverse applications. In addition, Oracle is giving customers the option of sharing a multi-tenant SaaS environment with customers or using a single-tenant approach that allows customers to customize the application environment to their specific requirements.

It's pretty clear at this juncture that SaaS platforms are going to be an important part of the IT landscape. But not every application is going to be delivered as a service. That means that IT organizations need to take a step back in the planning process to think about taking a more structured approach to integrating SaaS and on-premise applications in a way that makes the most strategic sense for the business not just this year, but through the next decade.

The Changing Dynamics of Desktop Virtualization

It seems these days just about everybody is considering some form of virtualization on the desktop.

That doesn't mean everybody is rushing to do this tomorrow, but it does mean that people are considering their options. In particular, they are concerned about the impact that virtualization may have on their networks and just what kind of management tools might they have at their disposal.

To address the latter issue Symantec has roll out an Endpoint Virtualization Suite that essentially rolls up a lot of the virtualization technology that Symantec has acquired over the last two years inside a single offering.

At the core of the Symantec approach to managing virtualization is a simple concept. The same tools that IT organizations use to manage physical systems should also be able to manage virtual systems. After all, IT organizations to not want to incur the additional expense of first acquiring and then mastering separate tools to manage virtualization. With that in mind, the Symantec Endpoint Virtualization Suite is designed to work with all of Symantec's traditional systems management tools.

What's really interesting about all this focus on virtualization on the desktop is that the end result is going to be a separation of the end user from the underlying physical machine. Instead, end users will essentially have personalities that will be associated with them every time they log on to the network regardless of the device they are actually using.

That kind of approach to personal computing is naturally going to require a major change to the way we think about IT management. All too often, we think of IT management as basically a set of maintenance activities tied to a physical machine. Those activities will always be required, but in the future IT management is going to be a lot more about managing the attributes of the user and a whole lot less about the physical machines.

Monday, February 09, 2009 11:09 AM/EST
For IT Spending, Don't Believe the Hype

So 2008 wasn't the greatest.

About this time last year, as fears of a recession began to take hold, we put together our 2008 IT Spending package. The mood wasn't too bad yet: spending was down and cost-cutting pressures were up, but there was still money around for critical projects. But not a whole lot of panic. (Surprisingly, we saw the same thing in December in our Future of IT study.)

Still, as expected, plenty of things went wrong. For example, CIOs predicted big spending on a bunch of technologies that, according to our upcoming IT spending research, didn't quite match the hype in 2008.

Despite the expected spending cuts in 2009, I'm sure we'll see plenty of over-hyping as we look back next year.

But what drives the hype? For one, IT vendors are in the business of selling certain products, so their marketing campaigns have a great deal of influence over CIOs' spending decisions. That's a given.

Then there's the never-ending desire to innovate and experiment with new technologies. I'm guessing we won't see too much of that this year, but you never know. (I guess the media is partially to blame, too.)

Outdated Security Software Threatens Web Commerce
By JOHN MARKOFF

A team of U.S. and European computer security researchers have used a cluster of several hundred Sony PlayStation 3 video-game machines to exploit a basic weakness in the software system used to protect commercial transactions made via the Internet.

The attack is possible because a handful of commercial organizations that provide components of the basic security infrastructure of the Internet are using an older security technology — despite years of warnings that it is now potentially obsolete. The flaw would make it possible for a criminal to redirect a Web surfer to a fake bank or online merchant without being detected by the security mechanism embedded in today’s Web browsers. It could also be used to subvert e-mail communications and other applications that use cryptographic software for authentication and security.

The demonstration underscores that the commercial infrastructure, as well as the privacy and security, of the Internet are based on an advanced branch of mathematics that in the future may become vulnerable to more powerful computing systems and more clever attackers.

Making the Case for State and Local Government Sales Strategies

As the economic realities of the current financial crisis take hold, businesses and organizations of all sizes and across all sectors are beginning to feel the trickle down effects. Operations and budgets are being scoured with a fine-toothed comb in hopes to find areas where performance improvement and cost savings can be found, leaving sales teams in a precarious situation. The question "Are we going to make our numbers?" looms large on everyone's mind. Even the most optimistic of CEOs and sales executives will likely feel as though they are heading into the lion's den with their hair on fire as they prepare for end of the year financial reporting and tough questions from their Board of Directors. As the year winds down and you map out your plan to maintain and improve next year's bottom line, it is a great time to consider creating or enhancing a presence within the state and local government market.

State and local governments are the backbone of our local economies. Usually one of the largest purchasers of goods and services, they also are among the largest employers in their respective localities. And regardless of the economic climate of the day, governments still need to provide services to their constituents. In down-turned economic times, they need to do so even more efficiently, opening up the market for products, technology and services that do just that. This is particularly true in health care and education, the two largest segments of state and local government budgets.

Additionally, while the focus on doing more with less increases, simultaneously state and local government spending is expected to continue to increase in the key areas like IT, infrastructure and homeland security. With government sales providing a steady stream of revenue, given the multiple year terms with follow on options, the state and local government market can serve as a steady platform that can lessen the blow of decreased or lost commercial sales.

D-Wave Arms ‘Smoking Gun’ Proof of Quantum Computer
By ASHLEE VANCE

D-Wave Systems, a Canadian start-up, claims to have concocted a way of proving that its quantum computer is actually a quantum computer. But to pull off the proof, it needs thousands of people to volunteer spare time on their personal computers.

VMWare VI4 renamed to vSphere

For those interested in where VMWare's Virtual Infrastructure is heading, there was interesting news out of a Minneapolis VMWare User Group (VMUG) meeting yesterday: apparently VMWare is making it official that VI4 is now vSphere.

From Jason Boche's blog:

Today at the Minneapolis VMware User Group (VMUG) meeting, VMware employees disclosed to a group of 150+ attendees the new name for the next generation of Virtual Infrastructure many have been referring to as VI4 or VI.next. The new name is VMware vSphere. I value and respect the various relationships I have with VMware and thus before posting this news, I checked with authoritative sources inside VMware. VMware Marketing has endorsed the release of this information to the public. VMware also released a few new configuration maximum details on vSphere but for now I am keeping that information to myself. Other audience members in attendance may decide to break this news.

Why does this matter to cloud computing fans, you ask?

VMWare's vCloud vision depends greatly on the upcoming features that expand the scale in which VMWare's core products can operate; expanding beyond the server to the data center as a whole and beyond. Rumors of features such as over-WAN migration of virtual machines in VI4 are key to the vision of federated VMWare-based clouds becoming a reality. So, create a Google Alert for vSphere, sit back and watch the show.

Filtering Twitter, One Tweet at a Time
By JENNA WORTHAM

This is part of a series of posts this week on happenings in the sprawling but always succinct world of Twitter.

Here are a few that caught our eye:

As the San Francisco-based Twitter grows in popularity, third-party developers have jumped at the opportunity to create tools, both fun and functional, for the site.

Of the more common categories of apps to spin off the microblogging site, one involves services that aim to organize and filter the hundreds of conversations, from impromptu snowball fights to political scandals, under way at any given moment.

TweetDeck: As your Twitter network grows, the steady influx of tweets flowing into your account can become unmanageable to follow. TweetDeck is a free Twitter desktop client that helps manage your Twitterverse. The site runs on Adobe Air and splays out all your incoming tweets, replies and direct messages for easy navigation.

StockTwits: StockTwits is a free service that lets Twitterers zero in on a single subject, the finance industry and stock performances. StockTwits skims Twitter for updated tagged with stock symbols and aggregates them onto a single site with stock chats and comments. The two-month-old start-up recently caught the attention of a group of investors led by Roger Ehrenberg’s IA Capital Partners, who contributed $800,000 in venture financing. StockTwits is also working with Bloomberg to syndicate a feed of commentary pulled from the service.

TweetBeep: Like Google Alerts, but for Twitter, TweetBeep is a free Web-based service that will send you an e-mail notification when a certain keyword, name or phrase appears on Twitter. This tool could come in handy for companies or self-Googlers eager to stay abreast of their online reputation in the Twitterverse.

Have a favorite Twitter app of any kind that we overlooked? The comment section waits.

Seeing the Future in NPR’s Custom News Podcast

National Public Radio has introduced a nifty little feature that lets you create your own custom podcast of NPR content on topics that interest you. Type in Obama or Madonna or whatever, and you can sign up for a stream of NPR clips that match your keywords that can be downloaded to your computer, smartphone, iPod or Zune.

I’m highlighting this, not because I think this particular feature will be all that widely used, at least in its current incarnation. Podcasts are not a mass market phenomenon now. For most services, only a small fraction of users choose any option that involves customization. And while NPR has done a decent job of making the service easy to use, it still has a few steps to it.

But I am very interested because I think that NPR is onto something that really shows where digital media is moving, especially for news.

Adobe AIR for Linux Delivers (if You Can Get it Installed)

Adobe has taken its Linux version of AIR out of beta with an official 1.5 release for popular Linux distros, which puts Air for Linux on par with its Windows and Mac counterparts.

Adobe AIR allows you to seamlessly run Flash and Javascript-based applications on the desktop. Like regular desktop apps, AIR applications are downloaded and installed on your hard drive and can take advantage of desktop tools like drag and drop support and more. But, unlike traditional desktop applications, AIR apps are powered by web technologies, so they can handle rich media like video and audio much better. They also feature more "web-like" user interfaces with customized scroll bars, buttons and controls.

AIR 1.5 was released for both the Mac and Windows platforms last month and offers some nice new additions that Linux fans have been clamoring for — like a faster Javascript engine and encrypted database support. To see how AIR for Linux stacked up with the Windows and Mac versions I took the new app for a spin.

The first thing that becomes readily apparent about AIR for Linux is that the installer hell many have complained about with Adobe Creative Suite 4 is not limited to CS4. The Adobe AIR installer downloads as a .bin file, which Adobe suggests you double-click to install.

State and Local Governments Tackle Security Projects

State and local governments around the country are worrying as much as any business enterprise about protecting the sensitive data they hold, based on a look at security projects in places such as Arizona, Indiana and Florida.
Arizona's government last year decided to create state-level positions for both CISO and chief privacy officer (CPO), after the Federal Trade Commission ranked Arizona first among all states in identity theft, though the exact reason wasn't cited by the FTC. After the state passed legislation for more oversight, David VanderNaalt, named CISO, began working with Mary Beth Joublanc, the state's CPO, in the newly created Statewide Information Security & Privacy Office at the Statewide Information Technology Agency.

Dell Sees Double With Data Center in a Container

The old Dell tended to let the other guys spend their time and money building big new markets. Then Dell would jump in with its vaunted low-cost model and begin taking market share.

The new Dell is proving to be edgier. In some cases, it’s willing to go after fresh product areas before there’s a market at all, and it’s prepared to chase sales in the dozens rather than thousands of units, if it means keeping demanding customers happy.

Albert Esser, vice president of data center infrastructure at Dell, pulls out a server inside of Dell’s new data center that comes in two shipping containers. (Credit: Erich Schlegel for The New York Times)
As a case in point, Dell has entered the fledgling market for data centers packaged inside shipping containers with a unique, double-decker design that is code-named Humidor. The company showed off its data-center-in-a-box for the first time during my visit last week to its headquarters in Round Rock, Tex.

T he Ten Best Business Books Of All Time For CIOs

Look, 2009 is shaping up to be a very tough economic year. Here is my list of business books that are enduring, well written and may just help you get through the current economic crunch. While some of these titles are classics, a few are new, and some are different and I have little doubt will not be found on any other business book list.

Simplifying Security

There has to be a simpler way of securing communications across diverse networks of people.

That's pretty much the driving concept behind a new Stealth Security initiative created by Unisys for the Federal government that leverages communication software created by Unisys and a new approach to encryption developed by Security First Corp. to reduce the headaches of managing identities and encryption on the network.

The communications software developed by Unisys is able to identify all the users on any particular network and then automatically assign encryption keys to data traveling across multiple networks that are running the Unisys communications software. This eliminates most of the headaches associated with deploying and managing identity management software.

Copper Thieves Threaten U.S. Infrastructure, FBI says

Copper thieves, sometimes acting as "organized groups," are threatening what the FBI said is "critical" U.S. infrastructure, from electrical sub-stations, cellular towers, telephone land lines to railroads and crops, the agency said in an unclassified report unveiled Wednesday.

.Tel Them Where to Find You

On Wednesday, companies and organizations can register Web addresses with a new top-level domain, .tel. The new domain, which stores and encrypts contact information directly into the Domain Name System, has the potential to become a phone book for the Internet.

Novell ready to read final rites on SCO

SCO loses yet another "final" round in its longstanding fight claiming "ownership" of Unix. It's got (almost) no cash. It's got no case. Won't someone put it out of our misery?

New Tools Help You Build Better Maps

What’s cooler than Google Maps? Tools built on top of it. Developers from the Netherlands have released some helpful libraries to make more usable, interactive Google Maps.
Google hosts an open source utility library with several useful examples. Among them, a drag-to-zoom feature and a way to create dynamic labeled markers.
A progress bar is among the new additions to the libraries. When adding more than just a few markers, it can take some time. Rather than make your users sit through the slow-down, this library shows the progress via a popup status bar that fills as it completes.
The other new library, SnapToRoute, allows developers to restrict some actions to just along a polyline. The example included shows zooming along a specific route.
I love these sorts of libraries that make creating advanced maps easy. Of course, I’d love to see platform-independent examples, so developers of any map API could benefit. These libraries would be great to see as a part of Mapstraction, the multi-map I covered in a tutorial.

Let My Maps Be Your Geo Database

Toss out that MySQL book. The only thing you need to store location data is Google Maps.
My Maps is a feature that lets you create your own mashup on a map. Once a map is created, it can be shared with a link, or in Google Earth with a KML file. And now, it is also available via RSS–GeoRSS, to be more specific.

Why Doesn’t City Government Webcast?

If you couldn’t elbow your way into the throngs of spectators at the term-limits hearings earlier this month or watch them live on NY1, there wasn’t really any other way to follow the testimony. While City Room would like to think that its live blogging made you feel were inside Council chamber, we wondered why legislative hearings and meetings, including those that draw intense public interest, aren’t streamed on the Web.

After all, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority already has Web casts its meetings and even archives the recordings. Cities large and small across the country use Web casts: Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, even Apache Junction, Ariz.

ICANN Targeting Notorious Domain Name Seller

The net's authority over domain names is set to pull the plug on an Estonia-based seller of domain names that security researchers say has been a refuge for cyber-criminals for years.
ICANN told the EstDomains on Tuesday that it was revoking its accreditation since it learned the company's president Vladimir Tsastin had been convicted in February in Estonia for online credit card fraud and money laundering.
The Tuesday notice (.pdf) said that ICANN, which controls the distribution of the net's names and IP addresses, was immediately freezing EstDomain's ability to register new domain names and looking to find stewards for the 281,000 domain names that EstDomains manages.

Flexible Displays Closer to Reality, Thanks to U.S. Army

Imagine a screen so thin, light and flexible that it can be rolled up and carried in your pocket, while consuming almost zero power.
That technology could become reality in two to three years, thanks to U.S. Army-backed research being done at Arizona State University's Flexible Display Center. According to Army researchers, the displays could be in field trials with soldiers as early as 2010 or 2011.

Intel and Asus try crowdsourcing PCs
The two companies aim to deliver "what could be the world's first community-designed PCs" by soliciting ideas on their WePC site

Crowdsourcing is one of today's hot topics, and Intel and Asus have launched a project to use it in the design of innovative PCs, via a Web site at WePC.com. The headline view is: You dream it. Asus builds it. Intel inside it.

The site has sections for notebooks, netbooks and gaming PCs. As with Dell's IdeaStorm, users can vote on other people's ideas. There's also a Community section for blog posts.

The Race to Instant-On Computers Begins

The most fundamental change to the way people interact with PCs since the advent of the Internet may be occurring. The traditional PC is giving way to a new type of machine which has functions somewhere between a smartphone and an Internet appliance. Now it’s up to Microsoft to respond to the altered landscape or perhaps turn into a less relevant software maker.

In a story published Sunday, Matt Richtel and I covered one of the big drivers behind this change in computing behavior – near instant-on machines. These products provide access to basic functions such as the Internet, messaging and Web telephone products in about 20 seconds. The quick boot feature can prove a relief for people tired of waiting anywhere between 90 seconds and four minutes for their computers to start.

Searching for the Mobile Web

Industry leaders hope that new technologies will make mobile search more usable. Search technology has transformed the way that people use the Internet and has made piles of money for giants like Google. This week at Mobile Internet World 2008, in Boston, industry leaders gathered to talk about emerging technologies that might at last bring useful Internet search to mobile devices too.

Feds Start Moving on Net Security Hole
By Ryan Singel October 08, 2008 | 8:05:21 PM Categories: Cybersecurity, Hacks And Cracks

Starting Thursday morning, the U.S. government is seeking comment on who should create and vouch for the internet's most crucial document -- the root zone file -- that serves as the cornerstone of the system that lets users get to websites and emails find their way to inboxes.
The non-profit ICANN, the for-profit Verisign and the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration all have different answers to what is a long-standing, and geopolitically charged internet governance question.

Geode Tells Firefox Where You Are, What’s Nearby

As we mentioned this morning, Mozilla has officially launched Geode, an experimental version of the location-aware tools that will become part of future Firefox releases. Geode and future versions of Firefox will support the new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the ability for websites to request, and you to optionally grant access to, your current location.
At the moment, Geode gets your location by using Skyhook’s Loki technology to map the WiFi signals in your area to your location. Once Geode is installed, any site requesting location info will trigger a small toolbar that allows you to choose varying levels of detail that you want the site to access.

IBM Researchers Using iPhone App Store as Test Bed

Scientists studying the mobile web are seeding Apple's iPhone Applications Store with research projects in a bid to see how users in the real world take to them. The projects include an experimental text-input system and an application to sync multiple devices.
Almaden is so interested in the iPhone, it is making them available for free to all 100 of its computer scientists to help them understand how consumers use the device.
"The iPhone App Store gave us a chance to experiment in the wild," says researcher Shumin Zhai, who has added the experimental text-input system WritingPad to the App Store as a free download. "Putting it on the iPhone App Store gave us a sense of the value of the technology."
Computer scientists’ interest in the iPhone is not surprising. The device is quickly becoming the first mainstream mobile computing platform. The iPhone has already captured about 17 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, according to the NPD Group, and the App Store has become a quick and easy way for third-party developers to distribute their software. As of August, more than 60 million iPhone apps had been downloaded, according to Apple.

Microsoft Promises New, Fluffier Version of Windows

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, has hit the European press circuit in full-on tease mode. He’s talking up a new version of the Windows operating system that will cater to so-called “cloud computing” technology, where people use software that’s running in a data center rather than on their local machine.

Mr. Ballmer has mentioned this operating system, dubbed Windows Cloud, at events in London and Paris. The name-dropping comes ahead of Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference later this month in Los Angeles.

I.B.M. Releases Bluehouse for Workplace Collaboration
By ASHLEE VANCE

There’s an arms race of sorts taking place among some of the world’s largest technology companies as they scamper to control the next wave of office software.

Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Google, I.B.M. and others are selling applications under the unified communications and collaboration banners. Their various packages replace yesteryear’s e-mail and contact software with suites that include Web conferencing, instant messaging, e-mail, online teamwork areas and spots to share all kinds of files.

I.B.M. Lends a Hand to ARM

If you’re ARM Holdings, it’s nice to know that there are some companies out there willing to help you go to war against Intel.

Based in Cambridge, England, ARM creates microprocessor designs that other companies license, tweak and slot into their own array of products. The company’s expertise in chips that use little power has made it a particular friend of mobile device makers, including Apple which uses ARM silicon in the iPhone.

The good news for ARM is its popularity with the mobile set. The bad news is that Intel this year decided to have a crack at ARM’s business by releasing the Atom processor, which goes into small computers today and will eventually reach mobile phones as well.

I.B.M. Puts iPhone in the Lotus Position
By ASHLEE VANCE

Apple’s push to make the iPhone a desired device among the world’s largest companies should receive a boost this week thanks to I.B.M.

At long last, I.B.M. has issued software which will bring the e-mail, calendar and contacts functions handled by its Lotus Notes software over to the iPhone. Called iNotes Ultralite, the package will be free for anyone with a Lotus Notes license, and, as of last check, I.B.M. had moved about 140 million Lotus licenses. Lotus Notes remains popular among corporations.

Oracle Embraces H.P. in ‘Hardware’ Push

Oracle dealt a blow Wednesday to its longtime ally Sun Microsystems by “entering the hardware business” in tandem with Hewlett-Packard.

Oracle, best known for its database software and related applications, showed off a pair of new server systems that should make its database run faster than ever before and give the company a leg up in the growing field for systems known as data warehouses.

“That’s right, Oracle is going into the hardware business. But we’re not going alone,” said Oracle’s chief executive, Larry Ellison, speaking at the company’s user conference in San Francisco.

Oracle, in fact, is not entering the hardware business in any traditional sense. Salespeople working for the software company can take orders for the new systems, but H.P. will make, deliver and service the gear –- just as it has always done.

Cisco Is Jabbering Its Way Into Office Cubicles

The switching gear made by Cisco Systems tends to lurk in the deepest, darkest parts of data centers. It pushes information between servers and storage systems and funnels data out to the myriad networks that combine to form the Internet. When everything functions well, Cisco’s hardware lives in relative anonymity.

Over the last couple of years, however, Cisco has worked to get itself more directly onto workers’ desks. The company sells voice-over-Internet-protocol phones along with video conferencing systems. It also acquired WebEx for $3.2 billion in March 2007, adding an online meeting and collaboration software element to its arsenal, and purchased the e-mail and calendar software provider PostPath last month for $215 million.

On Friday, Cisco rounded out that online play with the acquisition of Jabber, a privately held messaging specialist.

Crowd Sourcing Mobile Apps to Change the World

Dean Kamen has teamed up with Forum Nokia to encourage young mobile developers to create the next big application to benefit society. The contest "Calling All Innovators," which they announced today at Web Expo 2.0 in New York, will award up to $150,000 dollars to the winner, and Nokia will help him or her to distribute the application.

Its Creator Seeks an Even Wider Web
By STEVE LOHR

The Web may seem ubiquitous to most of us, but its creator, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, keeps seeing its limitations. And he keeps trying to do something about those limitations, and make sure the Web is as open and widely accessible as possible.

I.B.M. Returns to the Storage Market
By STEVE LOHR

The announcement presented I.B.M.’s vision, and marketing pitch, for data center storage in the next wave of Internet computing — all the data created by e-mail, wikis, blogs, social networking, video (from YouTube-style entertainment to police surveillance), all the user-generated content in companies. Much of this involves Web-based services, delivered from the computing “cloud” — modern, flexible data centers — to consumers and corporate customers.

“To support the cloud and rich content delivered in an efficient way to consumers is going to require a massive set of changes,” said Andy Monshaw, general manager of I.B.M.’s storage group.

The early customers for I.B.M. new-age storage offerings, Mr. Monshaw said, will include Internet companies, banks and insurance companies, telecommunications companies, retailers and government agencies.

“This is I.B.M. saying we’re in this business and trying to present an approach that makes sense of all this complexity,” said Roger Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a research firm.

Do AndroidGuys Dream of Google Phones?
By LAURA M. HOLSON

There are many well-known blogs that track developments in the mobile phone industry, from the Boy Genius Report to mocoNews.net.

But sometimes it’s the little guys that are more interesting. One such blog that caught my attention in recent weeks is AndroidGuys, which has chronicled Google’s year-long effort to bring to consumers a mobile phone powered by the company’s new Android software.

Pay no attention to rumors that the internet is getting full

In fact, over the last 12 months, international net bandwidth in backbone grew 62 percent, while internet traffic grew only 53 percent and filled only 43 percent of the tubes' capacity at peak times, according to a new report released by bandwidth-monitoring firm TeleGeography.
In short, the internet's tubes are growing faster than even YouTube videos can fill them, and they're in no danger of filling up anytime soon.
That's despite the occasional Chicken Little proclamation from ISPs, pending caps on 'unlimited' internet usage and hand-wringing over peer-to-peer file sharing of movies such as Cool Hand Luke.
In the same time period -- mid-2007 to mid-2008, Latin America and South Asia both doubled the capacity of their backbones -- the net's fiber-optic equivalent of a highway system.
Wholesale prices for sending and receiving data continue to fall, and with the cheapest prices in North America and Europe, where there's still more abundant capacity, the Global Internet Geography report found.

Firefox boss responds to Google's Chrome
Mozilla's best friend is about to invade Mozilla's prime market with a Windows browser
September 2, 2008 11:08 AM

John Lilly, chief executive of Mozilla Corporation, has blogged about the launch of Google's promised Chrome browser (below). Basically he welcomes the competition and says: "Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it'll be interesting to see how it evolves."

Lilly also addresses the obvious questions: How does this affect Mozilla? and What does this mean for Mozilla's relationship with Google? He says:

On the technical side of things, we've collaborated most recently on Breakpad, the system we use for crash reports -- stuff like that will continue. On the product front, we've worked with them to implement best-in-class anti-phishing and anti-malware that we've built into Firefox, and looks like they're building into Chrome. On the financial front, as has been reported lately, we've just renewed our economic arrangement with them through November 2011, which means a lot for our ability to continue to invest in Firefox and in new things like mobile and services.

Google's Chrome and the browser end game

A blog about technology from BBC News

The news that Google is launching its own open source browser, called Chrome, has understandably got the blogosphere all excited.

It's certainly the biggest news in the browser space since Firefox started to dent Internet Explorer's lead and many people see this as a re-ignition of the browser wars. A few things struck me:

How to avoid spam: start with a Z
What's in a name? Quite a lot, it seems
August 26, 2008 12:38 PM

Fed up with spam? You're not the only one. But Cambridge University security researcher Richard Clayton thinks the problem might not just be your spam filters, but your name. In an academic paper - recounted at Light Blue Touchpaper blogs - he says that Aardvarks - people with names high in the alphabet - receive 35% spam, and zebras - those at the tail end of the dictionary - get 20%. Why?

3-D Printing for the Masses (flash audio)

By Duncan Graham-Rowe, MIT Review

A new online service aims to bring customized manufacturing to the masses by allowing consumers to submit digital designs of products that are then printed, using 3-D printers, and shipped back. Currently, such 3-D printers--in which successive layers of different polymers are sprayed gradually, building up a 3-D object--are very expensive, says Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO of Shapeways, a spinout from Philips Research, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. But the new service, launched last week, makes this technology accessible to anyone: budding artists, architects, product designers, and general hobbyists. A small design company might want to make samples to show a client, or an artist might want to make copies of the same sculpture created digitally, for example.

AT&T Mulls Watching You Surf
By SAUL HANSELL/Technology
UPDATE Comment from Google has been added.

AT&T is “carefully considering” monitoring the Web-surfing activities of customers who use its Internet service, the company said in a letter in response to an inquiry from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Intel Releases USB 3.0 Interface Specifications

Intel has released a draft specification revision 0.9 for the Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI). The revision, released Wednesday, comes in support of USB 3.0 architecture, also known as SuperSpeed USB. The draft specification provides a standard method for USB 3.0 host controllers to communicate with the USB 3.0 software stack.

One important factor in adopting SuperSpeed USB products is interoperability between multiple devices from different manufacturers. The xHCI draft specification revision 0.9 aims to make interoperability easier to implement, while also making it easier for developers to create software support for the market.

JavaScript 2 Looking Good Thanks to ‘Harmony’ Project
By Scott Gilbertson

The dust is finally starting to settle in the world of JavaScript, which is the primary tool that powers many of web 2.0’s most popular features. As we’ve mentioned in the past, JavaScript is due for an update and the specification on which JavaScript is based — known as ECMAScript — was planning a serious overhaul. However, the ECMAScript 4 specification, which would have been the basis of JavaScript 2, has been reworked and its ambitions somewhat curtailed in favor of practicality. Virtually as soon as ECMAScript 4 was proposed a group headed by Microsoft and Yahoo split off and suggested ECMAScript 3.1 as an incremental step to 4.0. Since then the two groups has worked in conjunction, but also sometimes at odds.Fortunately for web developers hungry for the the next generation of JavaScript, the ECMAScript specification is nearing completion.

Mozilla Labs has put out a call for concepts. The people who brought you Firefox want your ideas, mockups or prototypes.

Mozilla Labs, from the people who brought you Firefox, has put out a call for participation. It says: Today we're calling on industry, higher education and people from around the world to get involved and share their ideas and expertise as we collectively explore and design future directions for the Web.

fire eagle site

today in Webmonkey/tutorial

Don't Touch That File! Modifying User Permissions

If you've ever tried to edit a file stored on a Unix or Linux server, you've probably seen a user permissions message -- usually an error. User permissions are a necessary roadblock on any file server, but dealing with them doesn't have to be a pain. Webmonkey Paul Adams demystifies those puzzling permissions.

Onstream Media Awarded Three New Public Sector Contracts

POMPANO BEACH, Fla., Aug. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Onstream Media Corporation (Nasdaq: ONSM), an online service provider of live and on-demand Internet video, today announced that it has been awarded three new multi-year public sector webcasting services contracts. Onstream Media's robust set of on-line digital media services, combined with Akamai Technologies Inc.'s (Nasdaq: AKAM) globally-distributed network for delivering and accelerating content and applications, will support the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), California State Department of Technology Services (DTS), and California State Board of Equalization (BOE) for an allocated total of $1.5 million in contract awards. These projects are all intended to help make legislative discussion and materials more transparent to the public. Onstream Media is an Akamai reseller. Government agencies today need a proven solution to provide video and audio broadcasts online and ensure that public hearings, training material and other specialized events and information are available to reach their constituents, industry partners and employees. Many government agencies do not have the resources and support tools and infrastructure to address this growing need. Onstream's relationship with Akamai enables the two organizations to address this critical need in the marketplace with solutions that are designed to ensure that customers in the public sector have access to these capabilities.

How to Fix the Spooks' New 'Vision'

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently released their new vision for the future of the spooks and spies community. And, shockingly enough, it's actually pretty smart -- sparking a bit of optimism for those who think serious change is too long in coming. It's a more far-reaching document than I have seen come out of the IC (Intelligence Community) in the past. The parts about supplying intelligence to everyone from the Departments of Health and Human Services to international organizations to private sector and non-governmental organizations were especially heartening.

That said, it still doesn't reach far enough. Everyone in the IC likes to say that we're in a period of unprecedented and extensive change. If that's the case, I'd expect the response to match the challenge. Some suggestions:

August 4, 2008 - 6:51 P.M.
Can IBM save Lotus from the Microsoft onslaught?
TAGS:IBM, Lotus, Microsoft, notes, SharePoint
Computerworld Blogs

Microsoft has IBM in its cross-hairs, aiming to kill Lotus Notes and replace it with SharePoint. But Microsoft will have a tough time, because IBM, rather than Microsoft, seems to have gotten religion when it comes to Web 2.0.

August 4, 2008, 7:41 am
Web Filtering Moves to the Cloud
By BRAD STONE

For those of you spending your workdays posting videos of the cat to YouTube or trading messages with friends on Facebook, you’d better start cultivating another pastime. Web filtering software is moving to the cloud — that all-knowing, pervasive, sometimes unreliable cluster of computers in the digital ether — and it’s going to watch your every move online and tattle to your boss. Zscaler, a Santa Clara start-up created by serial security entrepreneur Jay Chaudhry, is publicly unveiling itself Monday. Over the last decade, Mr. Chaudhry has founded such companies as AirDefense (sold to Motorola), CipherTrust (sold to Secure Computing), SecureIt (sold to VeriSign) and CoreHarbor (sold to USinterworking.) That makes him kind of like the Brett Favre of security entrepreneurs –- he keeps coming back. Zscaler’s idea is to relieve companies of the tiresome and costly burden of managing Web filtering and security on their own servers. Instead, the cloud-based service, which is rented to companies by the month, acts like a Web proxy, intercepting all incoming and outbound HTTP traffic from employees and scrubbing it for malware and online activity that violates company policy.

Firefox 3.1 Alpha Preview Delivers Slick New Features
By Scott Gilbertson

Firefox 3.0 is barely out of the gate, but already Mozilla is moving toward the future with the first alpha release of Firefox 3.1. The final release of 3.1 is scheduled for the end of 2008 with the usual series of alpha and beta releases in the coming months. The first 3.1 alpha (code-named Shiretoko) already packs some impressive new features like the new visual tab switcher, which offers previews of pages, and changes the sorting order based on which tab was most recently open. In essence it mimics the behavior of cmd-tab application switchers on most OSes. The visual eye candy is quite nice, but the real benefit is the dynamic ordering, which makes it much easier to quickly jump between recently viewed tabs.

Peeking Into Google’s Use of Data

Google, which gathers a lot of data and to some is increasingly scary, has decided to shine a spotlight on one way it is using all that information. According to a blog post on Wednesday, Google will start explaining how it customizes the search results it displays. Google uses its best guess about where you are and sometimes the history of what you searched for in an attempt to provide more relevant results.

Now a small note in the upper-right-hand corner of the results pages will give some clue that this is happening. In one example, the note reads “Customized for the San Francisco metro area.” The text may also have a link to a page that has additional information. In the example of this sort of page, Google showed the Internet Protocol address it used to determine that the search came from San Francisco. It also identified the previous search terms it was taking into account.

The Virtuous Competition in Cloud Computing Research

One more sign that we’ve entered the cloud computing era: the big corporate players are competing with each other to rev up academic research initiatives (partly with an eye toward wooing future computer scientists to work for them, of course). Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard and Intel announced a research venture on Tuesday that spans the United States, Germany and Singapore. The goal is to advance Internet-scale computing — the proverbial “cloud,” in which more computing chores are delivered to personal computers and cellphones as services, with the heavy computational lifting done remotely in large data centers.

The Ghost in Your Machine: IPv6 Gateway to Hackers

It may be years before the new internet protocol IPv6 takes over from the current IPv4, but a security researcher is warning that many systems – corporate and personal – are already open to attack through channels that have been enabled on their machines to support IPv6 traffic.

Social Networks Break Earthquake News First

Many may be shaken by the fact that the first news out of a 5.8 earthquake in Southern California shortly after noon Tuesday came from live streaming tweets on Twitter.

Even more stunning are the thousands of first-hand accounts that streamed in to the service shortly after the earthquake — all tweets confirming the authors were both okay and had electricity and/or cellphone service.

With this unfortunate natural disaster, social networks may have just proven its worth beyond fun and quirky notes about moods, feelings or what you’re doing on vacation. As shown today, the statuses can also be used for posting your health status, location and first-hand information after an emergency instantly to all of your friends and family.

Pressure mounts in the USA for a national broadband infrastructure policy

Many years of unrealised fibre projects have left the USA trailing far behind Asia in the deployment of FttH networks. Despite having very a high total number of broadband subscribers, in terms of penetration (based on subscribers per 100 inhabitants), the USA dropped from 4th place in 2001 to 12th place in 2004 where it remained through 2005 and 2006. By 2007 the USA had dropped a further three places to 15th.

Commenting Your Code — What’s Too Much, Too Little? By Scott Gilbertson

Do you often forget to comment your code and find yourself scratching your head years later, trying to figure out what’s going on? After a few experiences like that you might be tempted to start leaving comments all over the place, but that can be just as bad of an idea. Blogger Jeff Atwood recently posted an interesting look at what makes good comments and how some simple refactoring can make your code self-documenting. If you stick to best practices like giving functions and variables logical names, it shouldn’t be too hard for you or others to figure out how your code works.

New Foundation Wants to Bridge the Gaps Between Open Web Tools By Scott Gilbertson

Speaking at the OSCON Open Source Convention, Six Apart’s David Recordon recently announced the Open Web Foundation, a meta-standards organization dedicated to smoothing the way for large businesses to embrace open web standards like OAuth, OpenID and more. While there is already the Data Portability Workgroup, which acts as an open standards evangelist, the new Open Web Foundation aims to do the behind-the-scenes dirty work. The goal is to ensure that the various standards, like OAuth and OpenID have consistency, a legal framework and communication between them.

15th Annual Intergovernmental Technology Conference
April 7th & 8th, 2010

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Blogs Sponsored By:

This blog library reflects the newest and most current information related to the many facets of intergovernmental technology. Content will be added to and updated on a daily basis.

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fire eagle site

today in Webmonkey/tutorial

15th Annual Intergovernmental Technology Conference April 7th & 8th, 2010

Previous Conferences

Blogs Sponsored By:

This blog library reflects the newest and most current information related to the many facets of intergovernmental technology. Content will be added to and updated on a daily basis.

ETech 2009: Criminals are 'targeting basic blocks of the internet' Computer security expert says industry has failed to protect users - and now the chickens could be coming home to roost

The Broadband Gap: Why Do They Have More Fiber? By SAUL HANSELL This is the third in a series looking at the lessons for the United States from broadband deployment in other countries. Read the first and second posts.

A New Place for Clean, Green Tech News By VINDU GOEL

Monday, February 09, 2009 11:09 AM/EST For IT Spending, Don't Believe the Hype

Outdated Security Software Threatens Web Commerce By JOHN MARKOFF

D-Wave Arms ‘Smoking Gun’ Proof of Quantum Computer By ASHLEE VANCE

Filtering Twitter, One Tweet at a Time By JENNA WORTHAM

today in Webmonkey/tutorial

15th Annual Intergovernmental Technology Conference
April 7th & 8th, 2010

ETech 2009: Criminals are 'targeting basic blocks of the internet'
Computer security expert says industry has failed to protect users - and now the chickens could be coming home to roost

The Broadband Gap: Why Do They Have More Fiber?
By SAUL HANSELL
This is the third in a series looking at the lessons for the United States from broadband deployment in other countries. Read the first and second posts.

A New Place for Clean, Green Tech News
By VINDU GOEL

Monday, February 09, 2009 11:09 AM/EST
For IT Spending, Don't Believe the Hype

Outdated Security Software Threatens Web Commerce
By JOHN MARKOFF

D-Wave Arms ‘Smoking Gun’ Proof of Quantum Computer
By ASHLEE VANCE

Filtering Twitter, One Tweet at a Time
By JENNA WORTHAM