- Freedom in the Cloud — great talk by Eben Moglen on privacy and freedom in an age of networked services with centralised logs. What do we need? We need a really good webserver you can put in your pocket and plug in any place. In other words, it shouldn’t be any larger than the charger for your cell phone and you should be able to plug it in to any power jack in the world and any wire near it or sync it up to any wifi router that happens to be in its neighborhood. It should have a couple of USB ports that attach it to things. It should know how to bring itself up. It should know how to start its web server, how to collect all your stuff out of the social networking places where you’ve got it. It should know how to send an encrypted backup of everything to your friends’ servers. It should know how to microblog. It should know how to make some noise that’s like tweet but not going to infringe anybody’s trademark. In other words, it should know how to be you …oh excuse me I need to use a dangerous word – avatar – in a free net that works for you and keeps the logs. You can always tell what’s happening in your server and if anybody wants to know what’s happening in your server they can get a search warrant.
- An Observation on the Copyright Battles — this line from a comment on that blog is very good: What a pity international governments don’t seem to be able to make an agreement to ration finite resources like tuna, atmospheric carbon or fossil fuels, but instead devote their time to making an international agreement enforcing controls over something that costs no resources to copy. (via Glynn Moody)
- Definitive PHP Security Checklist — I’ve been in love with checklists since reading Atul Gawande’s fantastic essay on the subject (now a book) . Now I’m seeing them everywhere.
- Small, Cheap, and Not American (NY Times) — article about the future of the phone, pointing to the flowering powerful applications in the developing world; applications that the US does not have. Notable mainly for this factoid: The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a trade group. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet. (via the wonderful BoingBoing)
ENTRIES TAGGED "cloud computing"
Gov 2.0 Week in Review
Closing the IT gap, looking back at PDF, considering cloud computing and looking ahead to DC Week.
Will the Department of Health and Human Services make community health information as useful as GPS or weather data?
Cloud computing saves L.A. millions in IT costs
Los Angeles CTO Randi Levin on why her city moved into Google's cloud.
Nobody will end up with a completely SaaS model, says Randi Levin, at least not in the next couple of years. "What I do see is that most organizations are going to end up in a hybrid world where you have some on-site infrastructure; you have some hosted infrastructure, and you have some SaaS."
White House moves Recovery.gov to Amazon's cloud
Recovery.gov will be the first government website to be hosted within Amazon.com's public cloud.
Big Data shakes up the Speech Industry
I spent a few hours at the Mobile Voice conference and left with an appreciation of Google's impact on the speech industry. Google's speech offerings loomed over the few sessions I attended. Some of that was probably due to Michael Cohen's keynote1 describing Google's philosophy and approach, but clearly Google has the attention of all the speech vendors. Tim's recent…
Four short links: 12 April 2010
Cloud Privacy, Copyright Quirks, Checklist Mania, and Phone Phacts
Imagine a world that has moved entirely to cloud computing
For April Fools Day: a short story about a rare skill: Hardware
Guy.
The State of the Internet Operating System
Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet? I’ve been talking for years about “the internet operating system“, but I realized I’ve never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post.
Google's New Marketplace Has over a Thousand Apps
One week into its public launch, the Google Apps Marketplace has just under 1,500 (enterprise) apps. Combined with Salesfore.com’s app exchange (also with over a thousand apps), enterprises interested in moving to cloud apps have an increasing number of software tools to choose from.
Four short links: 1 March 2010
War Games, Cloud Metaphors, Plain English, and Event Correlations
- Meet The Sims and Shoot Them — America’s Army has proven so popular globally that, with so many users signing on from Internet cafes in China, the Chinese government tried to ban it. Full of interesting factoids like this about US military-created first person shooter America’s Army and other military uses of games. (via Jim Stogdill)
- Most Overused Cloud Metaphors, Sorted by Weather Pattern — headline writers beware: you are not being original with your “does the cloud have a silver lining?” folderol. (via lennysan on Twitter)
- Simply Understand — web site that translates a lot of UK government consultation documents (notorious for pompous and intricate prose) into plain English.
- Simple Event Correlator — small Unix part to find event correlations. It isn’t doing data mining to find correlations in a data stream, but rather you write rules like “tell me if X happens within Y seconds of a Z” and it takes events on stdin and emits correlations on stdout. (via NeilNeely on Twitter)
Four short links: 27 January 2010
Science Publishing, iState of the Union, Synthetic Bio Obstacles, UK Government Cloud
- Why I Am Disappointed with Nature Communications (Cameron Neylon) — fascinating to learn what you can’t do with “non-commercial”-licensed science research: using a paper for commercially funded research even within a university, using the content of paper to support a grant application, using the paper to judge a patent application, using a paper to assess the viability of a business idea.
- The iState of the Union (Slate) — humorous take on the State of the Union address, as given by Steve Jobs.
- Five Obstacles for Synthetic Biology — a reminder that biology is bloody hard, natural or synthetic. “There are very few molecular operations that you understand in the way that you understand a wrench or a screwdriver or a transistor,” says Rob Carlson, a principal at the engineering, consulting and design company Biodesic in Seattle, Washington. And the difficulties multiply as the networks get larger, limiting the ability to design more complex systems. A 2009 review showed that although the number of published synthetic biological circuits has risen over the past few years, the complexity of those circuits — or the number of regulatory parts they use — has begun to flatten out. (via Sciblogs)
- UK Government to Set Up Own Cloud (Guardian) — will build a dozen data centres (each costing £250m) and push for open source on central and local government computers, eventually resulting in thin clients and “shared utilities”. (via jasonwyran on Twitter)
Radar 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 
Radar on 