Great quote from an article about Apple’s near $700 stock price:
Will the iPhone in 50 years look like so many tail fins on those old Cadillacs?
It is hard to imagine what the next 50 years will bring in technology innovation, but I think it is a safe bet that the the iPhones of 2012 will seem like quaint relics of the ancient past when viewed from that distant vantage point.
I am beginning to read a compelling book, “America the Vulnerable: Inside the New Threat Matrix of Digital Espionage, Crime, and Warfare,” by Joel Brenner, former senior counsel at the National Security Agency.
My favorite line in the introduction:
Our world is becoming a collection of glass houses that provide only the illusion of shelter.
More to come soon.
I just finished reading a fascinating book, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, by James Gleick. My two favorite statements in the book occur in the first chapter and the last:
The first statement is attributed to Claude Shannon, who is generally recognized as the father of information theory. He wrote a letter to a colleague in 1939, which included this explanation:
I have been working on an analysis of some of the fundamental properties of general systems for the transmission of intelligence.” (emphasis added)
Although “information” has been accepted over “intelligence” as the commonly-used term in this area of science, the concept of transmitting and receiving intelligence has long fascinated me – from a scientific perspective because of my chosen profession and from a theological perspective related to the revelation of intelligence from God to man.
The second statement comes from Gleick himself in the final chapter, as he opined ever so succinctly on our life in an information-overloaded society:
The truth seems harder to find amid the multitude of plausible fictions.
I highly recommend the book. It is, as a USA Today writer stated, “Like the best college courses: challenging by rewarding.”
The Register reported today:
Hacker collective Team GhostShell leaked a cache of more than one million user account records from 100 websites over the weekend.
The group, which is affiliated with hacktivists Anonymous, claimed they broke into databases maintained by banks, US government agencies and consultancy firms to leak passwords and documents. Some of the pinched data includes credit histories from banks among other files, many of which were lifted from content management systems. Some of the breached databases each contained more than 30,000 records.
The bad guys aren’t done yet:
“All aboard the Smoke & Flames Train, Last stop, Hell,” Team GhostShell wrote. “Two more projects are still scheduled for this fall and winter. It’s only the beginning.”
I repeat the final question of my last post, “If this data is so important to enterprises, what are they doing to really secure it?â€
Capgemini recently released a report, “The Deciding Factor: Big Data & Decision making,†which states that:
“nine out of ten business leaders believe data is now the fourth factor of production, as fundamental to business as land, labor and capital.”
Furthermore,
“Two-thirds of executives consider their organizations are ‘data-driven’, reporting that data collection and analysis underpins their firm’s business strategy and day-to-day decision-making.”
According to Gartner Inc.,
“Business executives and IT managers are increasingly referring to information as one of their organization’s most critical and strategic corporate assets. Certainly there is a sharp rise in enterprises leveraging information as a performance fuel, competitive weaponry and a relationship adhesive.â€
This all begs the question, “If this data is so important to enterprises, what are they doing to really secure it?”
CNET reported today on a congressional committee wants to know whether Huawei, a telecommunications powerhouse is a national security threat.
Huawei is much larger than I realized:
Huawei is the second largest telecommunications equipment maker in the world, behind only Sweden’s Ericsson. It generated $32 billion in revenue last year, selling its networking technology to such global giants as Vodafone, Bell Canada and Telekom Malaysia, though only smaller U.S. carriers Leap and Clearwire use the company’s gear. Huawei’s heft has allowed it to pour resources into adjacent markets, such as mobile handset development and data center technology that’s already paying off with new customers and billions more in revenue. …
And Huawei is a patent machine, with about 50,000 patents filed worldwide. Though accused years ago of pilfering the innovations of Cisco and others, Huawei gets credit these days for breakthroughs in complex technologies such as radio access networking that lets mobile carriers support multiple communications standards on a single network. It also pioneered the dongles that consumers slip into laptops to wirelessly connect to the Web.
Because of their size, power and national origin, some are very worried:
The broader concern, though, is of a dangerous marriage of Huawei’s capability — it wants to build a massive swath of the telecommunications network, from routers and switches to the phones consumers use — with the Chinese government’s motive and intent. A report last year from the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive found that the Chinese are the “world’s most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage.” The committee wants to thwart the possibility Chinese cyberattacks in the United States over Huawei’s technology before the company, which has only a modest U.S. presence, grows into a powerhouse here. …
Hawks in the federal government remain unconvinced that his company is merely a financial success story. They worry that Huawei, whose technology provides infrastructure to communications networks, is a tool of the Chinese government, potentially enabling it to snoop on critical corporate and government data through digital backdoors that Huawei has the ability to install.
I don’t know the answers here, but this is certainly food for thought.
“I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul… we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.†(Neil Armstrong, 1930-2012)
When I was a little boy, my first career choice was Astronaut all the way. The engineering thing came later. In fact, my earliest recollection of being reprimanded at school was for stealing extra paper so I could draw rockets and space ships. So, in every sense of the word, Neil Armstrong and his compatriots were my heroes. Paradise gained a great man this week. We who are left behind are much better people for what Neil Armstrong and the space heroes contributed to us all.
Plus … You’ve gotta admit. That is one cool airplane!
This afternoon, I took an intriguing romp through several recent articles about personal data, clouds and operating systems – somewhat following on my recent exploration of Life Management Platforms, which fall into the same general category. I really like the emphasis on the term Personal. True personalization implies that I am able to leverage my identity to get more and more value from my online experience.
I started my little exploration with Drummond Reed’s recent post, Social, Local, Mobile, Personal, which led me to two posts on the Respect Network blog:
These posts in turn led me to an intriguing white paper, From Personal Computers to Personal Clouds, The Advent of the Cloud OS, written by industry luminaries Craig Burton, Scott David, Drummond Reed, Doc Searls, and Phil Windley,
A few items that really connected with me:
First, the following chart from Drummond’s post illustrates the progression toward a personal network or platform. That seems particularly relevant to me as Facebook, though social, is decidedly and increasingly less personal. I would very much like to see concepts such as Life Management Platforms and Personal Channels emerge to give me more control over my information and interactions with others.
Second, I like the concept that Personal Channels provide “Volume Control” plus “Intelligent Filtering and Organization.” I have become increasingly perturbed at the level of irrelevant noise on Facebook and Twitter. To some extent, I can filter things down by using groups and lists, but it is cumbersome and very limited.
Third, the concept of a cloud operating system is powerful. The ability to have a COS to handle services like Identity, Program Execution, Data Abstraction and Communication will enable much innovation and will be necessary to really deliver functionality like Life Management Platforms and Personal Channels.
However, unless someone can deliver infinite bandwidth to us all, I doubt that we will completely get away from the mobile device “calf” connected to the cloud “cow,” to borrow Craig Burton’s model. Intelligence at the personal device OS level that is uniquely positioned to provide crisp, beautiful and functional user interfaces will need to be seamlessly integrated with powerful functionality and connectivity at the COS level.
After reading and trying to understand all this innovative thinking, I bumped into an article about app.net, a project which claims to be building a “different kind of social platform”:
We’re building a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers … We believe that advertising-supported social services are so consistently and inextricably at odds with the interests of users and developers that something must be done.
It sounds like the app.net platform will not only provide a “personal channel,” but a cloud operating system of sorts, where developers can plug in interrelated applications in a standardized way. It doesn’t appear to possess all the qualities of a COS as defined in the Burton, et al, white paper, but perhaps it is a step in the right direction. I signed up as an early adopter in hopes their project gets funded.