What happens when you want to scan everything in the world and streets are too narrow for cars? Invent a scanning tricycle!  That’s what Google did.

A recent PCWorld article describes the Google Trike:

In 2009, Google introduced the Google Trike, a 250-pound, 9-foot-long, 7-foot-high bicycle equipped with the same terrain-charting cameras that deck out its Street View cars. The idea behind the Google Trike is to scope out locations where cars can’t go, such as parks, trails, university campuses, pedestrian malls, zoos, and other landmarks.

Now Google has released loads of new images taken from the Trike, such as the Château de Chenonceaux in Civray-de-Touraine, France and the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin. The pictures are accessible through Google Street View.

This short video shows how it works. Just think what a great workout you would get if this was your job.

Space.com reported yesterday that the U.S. Air Force’s second X-37B robotic space plane blasted off from Florida on the afternoon of March 5th on a mystery mission.  There was lots of secrecy around this launch, but space.com provided the following photo.  I find it interesting that this little shuttle-like spacecraft could just about fit in the room I’m sitting in right now.  I look forward to learning more of how this type of vehicle will be used in the future.

I have never been too successful as an entrepreneur.  I guess my brain doesn’t look quite like this delightful rendition from the Grasshopper Group:

Today, the US Air Force awarded a $35 billion contract to build the next generation of air refueling planes to Chicago-based Boeing Company.  The contract calls for producing 179 new tankers based on the 767 aircraft.

I find it ironic that the new Air Force tanker will be based on the same airframe as that of the Gimli Glider, an Air Canada airliner that ran out of fuel over Canada in 1983. 

From Wikipedia:

The Gimli Glider is the nickname of the Air Canada aircraft that was involved in a notable aviation incident. On 23 July 1983, Air Canada Flight 143, a Boeing 767-200 jet, ran out of fuel at 26,000 feet (7,920 m) altitude, about halfway through its flight from Montreal to Edmonton via Ottawa. The crew was able to glide the aircraft safely to an emergency landing at Gimli Industrial Park Airport, a former Canadian Air Force base at Gimli, Manitoba.

I hope the Air Force remembers correctly whether to measure fuel in liters or gallons (which goes to the root cause of the Gimli Glider fiasco).

I guess this all goes to prove that even old things (and people) can arise from the dust and be reborn into something great.

The NASA Picture of the Day site featured this incredible view of the Milky Way galaxy captured earlier this month over Neuchâtel, Switzerland.

The words of Psalm 8:3-5 come immediately to mind:

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

NASA: ISS Crew in space observe national moment of silence.

Great to see that respect for the victims of last Saturday’s violence extends beyond our traditional boundaries.

In his provocative Scientific American article entitled, “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality,” Tim Berners-Lee concludes, “The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending.”

I don’t agree with all Tim says in the article, but enjoyed reading the article and considering what he had to say.

Some of my favorite excerpts:

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

It was the subject of “threat” that caught my eye first. I know that government regulation is a threat, but how does Facebook threaten the Web?

Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.

So what?  Why is that a problem?

Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource on which you, your business, your community and your government depend. The Web is also vital to democracy, a communications channel that makes possible a continuous worldwide conversation. The Web is now more critical to free speech than any other medium. It brings principles established in the U.S. Constitution, the British Magna Carta and other important documents into the network age: freedom from being snooped on, filtered, censored and disconnected.

I like the focus on personal freedom.  I do believe that governments have difficulty oppressing their citizens if the right to communicate openly is assured – a philosophy the Web supports – if remains an open, easily accessible medium of information interchange.

Speaking of open-ness and closed-ness:

Open standards also foster serendipitous creation: someone may use them in ways no one imagined. We discover that on the Web every day.

In contrast, not using open standards creates closed worlds. Apple’s iTunes system, for example, identifies songs and videos using URIs that are open. But instead of “http:” the addresses begin with “itunes:,” which is proprietary. You can access an “itunes:” link only using Apple’s proprietary iTunes program. You can’t make a link to any information in the iTunes world—a song or information about a band. You can’t send that link to someone else to see. You are no longer on the Web. The iTunes world is centralized and walled off. You are trapped in a single store, rather than being on the open marketplace. For all the store’s wonderful features, its evolution is limited to what one company thinks up.

So what about net neutrality?

A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science. Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is. Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved.

This is an area where I may differ a bit with Tim.  It seems to me that we could have an Internet with different classes of service with different price tags, just like we have an automobile industry with different levels of luxury in the cars we buy.  It certainly is a timely topic and Tim’s comments are definitely worth reading.

One area where my thought’s converge closely with Tim’s are in governments’ violation of due process of law …

Totalitarian governments aren’t the only ones violating the network rights of their citizens. …

In these cases, no due process of law protects people before they are disconnected or their sites are blocked. Given the many ways the Web is crucial to our lives and our work, disconnection is a form of deprivation of liberty. Looking back to the Magna Carta, we should perhaps now affirm: “No person or organization shall be deprived of the ability to connect to others without due process of law and the presumption of innocence.”

All in all, a great article by a giant in our industry.  Thanks, Tim, for taking the time to write it.

About the Author:

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Today he is director of the international World Wide Web Consortium, based in the U.S. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a professor of engineering at M.I.T. and a professor of electronics and computer science at the University of Southampton in England.

Father to young son, “If you eat any more ice cream, you are going to explode!”

Son to Father, “Pass the ice cream, and stand back!”

That is about what I feel like right now, although I am ingesting Information Security information rather than ice cream.  If I try to stuff one more arcane detail about encryption algorithms, security models  or communications protocols into my brain, I think it will explode.

So … pass the information and stand back!

It is was fitting today that as I studied the subject of encryption in preparation for my CISSP exam, I stumbled upon information about the newly-formed United States Cyber Command, a US armed forces sub-command subordinate to United States Strategic Command. The command was officially activated May 21, 2010 and is slated to reach fully operational readiness by October 2010.

The Cyber Command:

“ … plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, stated in the official June 23rd announcement:

“Cyberspace and its associated technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to the United States and are vital to our nation’s security and, by extension, to all aspects of military operations. Yet our increasing dependency on cyberspace, alongside a growing array of cyber threats and vulnerabilities, adds a new element of risk to our national security. To address this risk effectively and to secure freedom of action in cyberspace, the Department of Defense requires a command that possesses the required technical capability and remains focused on the integration of cyberspace operations.”

OK.  This sounds like a good thing to do.  But what was really intriguing and fitting for me today was to learn that the command’s handsome new emblem contains an encrypted message its inner gold ring: 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a.

Can you figure out what it means?  The Wikipedia article for the command states:

“The text "9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a", which is located in the command’s emblem, is the MD5 hash of their mission statement.”

This is consistent with a statement from a command spokesman quoted in an article by John Cook of Yahoo! News.  However, something is not quite right.  John explained:

“We tried encrypting that entire statement using an MD5 hash generator, and we didn’t get a match to the logo code. So it looks like just a portion of the statement has been encoded.”

Wired Magazine has launched a contest to see who can crack to code.  Can you do it?  You can win a t-shirt from Wired or a ticket to the International Spy Museum.

Even better, rumor has it that the Cyber Command wants to hire 1,000 new cyber specialists over the next few years.  Maybe this game is part of the recruitment process.

Or … maybe this will remain another obscure mystery destined to someday being mentioned in a novel by Dan Brown.

I think that Kerberos (or Cerberus), the three-headed dog from Greek mythology that guards the gates of Hades, ought to be proclaimed the mascot of the CISSP exam.  I think studying for the exam (including Kerberos, the computer network authentication protocol) is going to eat me alive.