This flaw has been making the rounds today.

1. Wake your v2.0.2 PIN-locked iPhone (I haven't tried it with a alphanumeric passcode-locked iPhone, or a version other than 2.0.2)
2. Tap "Emergency Call"
3. Double-click the Home button

If your home button is configured to jump to your Favorites, that's where you wind up.

Problem #1? Now anyone has access to your Favorites in your contact list. They can call them. If they tap on the blue arrow next to the contact's name, they get access to the full contact information, allowing someone to text them, email them, and see their picture and address. Tapping a favorite's address finds them in Google Maps. If there's a URL associated with their address, you can open it in Safari.

Problem #2? When they email or text one of your favorites, they can cancel out of the message and have access to your mailboxes, or your entire text history. This also gives them access to your contacts list beyond just your favorites. The ability to open Safari gives them access to your web bookmarks and history, and opening Google Maps give them access to your maps favorites (as well as your contacts). In other words, it's a back door to much of the personal information on your iPhone.

Here's a simple workaround to close this vulnerability while we wait for a patch from Apple:

1. Tap "Settings"
2. Tap "General"
3. Tap "Home Button"
4. Tap "Home"

While you lose the ability to navigate to your Favorites contacts when your phone is locked, you shut the door on this hole.

What's truly frustrating is that this vuln was already fixed in a previous firmware update. How does a reversion like this make it through test?

Bruce Schneier asks:

How good are the passwords people are choosing to protect their computers and online accounts?

It's a hard question to answer because data is scarce. But recently, a colleague sent me some spoils from a MySpace phishing attack: 34,000 actual user names and passwords.

The attack was pretty basic. The attackers created a fake MySpace login page, and collected login information when users thought they were accessing their own account on the site. The data was forwarded to various compromised web servers, where the attackers would harvest it later.

MySpace estimates that more than 100,000 people fell for the attack before it was shut down. The data I have is from two different collection points, and was cleaned of the small percentage of people who realized they were responding to a phishing attack. I analyzed the data, and this is what I learned.

It seems we're getting incrementally better with passwords, at least as compared to studies conducted a decade or more ago. The reasons why aren't clear: maybe it's because the MySpace user demographic (which is significantly younger than the corporate user crowd) is more password-savvy, or perhaps it's because these users have bad password hygiene in other ways, such as reusing the same password across multiple services.

Tags: MySpace, phishing, passwords, security

I thought of this Andrew McAfee post as a continuation of the "Does IT Matter?" debate sparked by Nick Carr.

[T]he strong relationship between IT investment and productivity growth has broken down recently.  If this is accurate, it's quite bad news.  Productivity growth is a primary engine of economic growth and, ultimately, of increases in standard of living.  If the wonderful, unprecedented, and unanticipated productivity increases we've been enjoying since 1995 are in fact coming to and end despite our continued investment in computing, and despite the fact that computers continue to get much more powerful over time, then we have a problem.

Is IT really such a great leap forward in companies' abilities to better themselves that it's more than another process improvement program?  Does modern IT really deserve a place alongside electricity and the internal combustion engine?

The optimist would say that IT-enabled collaboration and knowledge sharing will usher in huge, but hard to quantify, productivity boosts. The pessimist might note that optimists have been saying bascially the same thing since computers were first networked.

Perhaps there's room for a third perspective, the realist, who says that businesses shouldn't invest in the basic building blocks of IT any more than they should invest in the basic building blocks of electricity. They should, however, spend on IT-enabled services to be delivered on demand. Put another way, spending money on infrastructure is spending money on infrastructure is spending money on automation; maybe we've done all the heavy lifting we can there. Innovation, on the other hand, where we improve processes or uncover new advantages, is where the discretionary IT dollar should be spent. By allowing companies to specialize in infrastructure in order to deliver higher-order services, IT organizations can shift their spending to higher impact efforts that subsume technology.

Tags: enterprise IT, productivity, Nick Carr, Andrew McAfee

This post on an Intel blog caught my eye:

A core component of a business value program is the concept of a using a common language of value that is defined by the customer, not IT. Business value dials (e.g., days of inventory, employee productivity, system end-of-life) represent the common language for identifying the value IT solutions deliver. To define business value dials, you need to know what is seen as valuable through the eyes of your end-users, your customer, and your company. For example, employees responsible for product inventory won’t think of IT solutions in terms of server uptime, database optimization, etc. They want to know specifically how the IT solution is going to allow them to better manage inventory and to do their job better.

Whether you call them dials, dashboards, reports, or scorecards, there's an increasing need for technology and business to erase the lexicographical lines that separate them in the enterprise. You'd have to search hard indeed to find a business process that isn't expressed in code somewhere, and enterprise technology isn't created simply for technology's sake. So why do business and IT have such a difficult time communicating?

My guess is that, in general, the functions have evolved faster than the reporting tools have. In other words, enterprise IT, as it's gotten more embedded, has become more business-savvy, and the business has gotten more digitally-aware, but the basic tools we use for communication, reports, analytics, metrics, haven't evolved in the same way. What we report is often dicated by what we can collect most easily, and that often means relying on the analytics and reporting tools built into the systems sold by enterprise IT vendors. Those tools are often limited in scope to the specific product sold by that vendor, or to the vendor's vision of enterprise architecture. When we try to implement reporting tools to cross vendor boundaries, we see difficult integration and information discovery issues. The desire to develop a complete picture that's as relevant to the business as it is to IT is clearly there, but it's thwarted by the complex, fragmented nature of the enterprise IT landscape.

Stepping back for a second, that means that even if the CIO and other top IT leaders have a vision for communicating with the business, as you get deeper into the technology organization, middle-managers, constricted by the tools they use, lapse back into an inward-looking, technology-driven vocabulary.

Since technology is Intel's business, perhaps their issues here will be easier to untangle, but it's telling that, even at Intel, the problem remains.

Tags: Intel, business, enterprise IT, value

This post on an Intel blog caught my eye:

A core component of a business value program is the concept of a using a common language of value that is defined by the customer, not IT. Business value dials (e.g., days of inventory, employee productivity, system end-of-life) represent the common language for identifying the value IT solutions deliver. To define business value dials, you need to know what is seen as valuable through the eyes of your end-users, your customer, and your company. For example, employees responsible for product inventory won’t think of IT solutions in terms of server uptime, database optimization, etc. They want to know specifically how the IT solution is going to allow them to better manage inventory and to do their job better.

Whether you call them dials, dashboards, reports, or scorecards, there's an increasing need for technology and business to erase the lexicographical lines that separate them in the enterprise. You'd have to search hard indeed to find a business process that isn't expressed in code somewhere, and enterprise technology isn't created simply for technology's sake. So why do business and IT have such a difficult time communicating?

My guess is that, in general, the functions have evolved faster than the reporting tools have. In other words, enterprise IT, as it's gotten more embedded, has become more business-savvy, and the business has gotten more digitally-aware, but the basic tools we use for communication, reports, analytics, metrics, haven't evolved in the same way. What we report is often dicated by what we can collect most easily, and that often means relying on the analytics and reporting tools built into the systems sold by enterprise IT vendors. Those tools are often limited in scope to the specific product sold by that vendor, or to the vendor's vision of enterprise architecture. When we try to implement reporting tools to cross vendor boundaries, we see difficult integration and information discovery issues. The desire to develop a complete picture that's as relevant to the business as it is to IT is clearly there, but it's thwarted by the complex, fragmented nature of the enterprise IT landscape.

Stepping back for a second, that means that even if the CIO and other top IT leaders have a vision for communicating with the business, as you get deeper into the technology organization, middle-managers, constricted by the tools they use, lapse back into an inward-looking, technology-driven vocabulary.

Since technology is Intel's business, perhaps their issues here will be easier to untangle, but it's telling that, even at Intel, the problem remains.

Tags: Intel, business, enterprise IT, value

Here's a some of what we've been up to on my other blog, Global Nerdy, a technology blog I write with Joey "AccordionGuy" deVilla:

• Bloomberg: Microsoft Zune Drops to Fifth in Music Player Sales
• Start-up CEO documents the occasionally soul-crushing exercise that is pitching VC
• BitTorrent.com and Zudeo: on the high ground, or just surrounded on all sides?
• That Crazy Japanese Wii Safety Manual
• Who's Bogarting the IPs?
• Punk Your Gullible Pals with Microsoft Firefox 2007
• That Slippery Wii Remote OpenCola Lives On in Swarmcast
• And Now, This Message From an Extreme Tab-Surfer
• Developers Stop Eating Grass Clippings, Switch to Tree Bark
• Searchblog: It's all over for AOL save the price tag
• NBC may move Saturday to Friday, and TV to the web
• Shortsighted studios stymie Apple video ambitions?

There you go: 13 reasons to stop by Global Nerdy. We're like TechCrunch without the connections, Scobleizer without the pageviews, or GigaOM without the cigars.

Tags: Global Nerdy, global domination

RIAA supremo Cary Sherman has a blood-boiling Op-Ed on CNET News right now called "The Farce Behind 'Digital Freedom.'"

Even I didn't think the RIAA was cynical enough to put ironic quotes around the word "freedom."

The target of Big Content's pitbull? The Consumer Electronics Association's CEO, Gary Shapiro. The CEA is one of many organizations (including the EFF) behind the Digital Freedom campaign, which was launched to check Big Content's desire to change copyright laws in the US in ways that restrict people's freedom to enjoy the stuff they buy in ways that are most convenient to them.

Remember how Jack Valenti (now there was a Big Content shill with some flair) claimed "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone?" Well, the same thing seems to happen periodically in the world of digital content, and this is one of those flare-ups.

Like a trademark that becomes generic, the fair use doctrine is in danger of losing its meaning and value if CEA's self-serving claims are taken at face value. CEA has twisted and contorted "fair use" beyond its true intent, turning it into a free pass for those who simply don't want to pay for creative works.

The "Digital Freedom" proponents have consistently staked their case out of the mainstream. CEA president and CEO Gary Shapiro's comment that unauthorized downloading is neither "illegal nor immoral" is illustrative of the extremist position of that group, especially given the U.S. Supreme Court's opinion otherwise in its 2005 Grokster ruling.

Sherman's first nifty rhetorical trick is to try to redefine fair use so narrowly as to be inapplicable to you and I. In truth, there's no place we can turn to in the Copyright Act that actually defines fair use as explicitly or exclusively as Sherman implies. What he avoids saying is that the entire doctrine is grounded ensuring the neither the commons nor individuals are unduly restricted by expansive copyright monopoly that serves only authors and owners.

For example, the transitive and temporary incidental copies of data made during their transmission over digital networks (ie, stuff that's cached or buffered when you download or stream it over the internet) was deemed fair use by the Copyright Office. One of the bills Digital Freedom is trying to fight, the Copyright Modernization Act, would force digital, interactive broadcasters (an on-demand internet radio station, like Pandora) to obtain separate licenses for those incidental copies, in addition to the usual licenses their conventional radio counterparts have to get. The Digital Freedom campaign doesn't want to let these services operate without licenses, but merely to ensure they don't face twice the financial burden of more traditional broadcasters. Shapiro's not exactly advocating "a free pass for those who simply don't want to pay for creative works."

Another example of the legislation Digital Freedom's trying to stop? The Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act (or NAMBLA), whose most odious provision explicitly stuffs fair use in a time capsule by allowing product designers and manufacturers (and users) the right only to "customary use." In other words, whatever Big Content has been forced to allow you to do in the past (like record to tape), they'll continue to permit, but no new stuff! In one fell swoop, fair use is no longer a balanced test applied to new situations as required, but a backward-looking, dead thing. It also means that innovation, any new, unforseen uses, are de facto infringing. Fighting this legislation is what it takes to be "out of the mainstream," in Sherman's view.

Not that you'll see Sherman tackle these, or any other substantive arguments, head-on in his op-ed piece. Then again, what do you expect from an industry whose companies feel justified in shaking down individual consumers, the technology industry, and treating their customers like criminals? Billboard magazine had this choice quote from one of the guys who pays Cary Sherman's salary:

"These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it," UMG chairman/CEO Doug Morris says. "So it's time to get paid for it."

It's true that what we have here is one well-paid lawyer and lobbyist slinging mud at yet another well-paid lawyer lobbyist, each representing huge corporations who, while professing an undyling love for the market, would just as soon have the government legislate their enemies into oblivion in order to guarantee their incomes. No matter who wins, I have a sneaking suspicion we lose. Even so, we have to pick a bastard in this fight, and I'm choosing the one whose client didn't just call me a crook.

Link

Tags: Digital Freedom, RIAA, CEA, fair use, copyright, Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act, Copyright Modernization Act

[Cross-posted to from Global Nerdy, the technology blog I write wi...ah, hell, you know what Global Nerdy is. Go!]

I don't imagine for a moment that I'm alone this morning in trying to figure out the implications of Sun's decision to license and distribute their implementation of Java (SE, EE, and ME) under the Gnu General Public License (version 2).

Practically, it means that the code that makes up the various editions of the Java platform will be free (as in speech). I say "will be;" every line of every module must be vetted or incompatible copyrights, and those issues will have to be resolved before the code itself can be released under the GPL. Where the issues can't be resolved, Sun will release the modules as binary plug-ins. Sun expects the process to be done in 2007.

My initial reaction is that Sun is trying to get rid of any barrier to adoption on the part of the Linux vendors. By employing the GPL, Sun's essentially saying that there's no reason for Linux to ship without a Java implementation. Of all of the reasons Sun cites for going with the GPL, I think this is the most significant: Linux distros will be able to qualify and ship with the appropriate Java implementation as a default, thus broadening the footprint of the Java platform for developers.

Java, after all, is fighting a pitched battle to be the platform for the web. It's competitors are .NET (and there's no real hope of increasing Java's footprint on Microsoft's server operating systems) and the ever-mutable LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/PHP+various substitutes) stack. One look at O'Reilly's latest state of the computer book market tells you what you need to know about the rise of LAMP and the decline of Java when it comes to releasing web-architected applications. By (hopefully) shipping side-by-side with LAMP (and Mono, for that matter), Sun probably hopes to slow the defections and bring more developers back into the Java world.

The flip side of this, of course, is the health of Java itself. It's clearly an incredibly capable platform, but it would seem that to truly take advantage of the dynamics of the open source movement, you need to play nice with the GPL. The GPL is predominant among SourceForge's most active projects, so Sun has taken to heart the idea that developer community only forms around the license that afford the most transparency, reciprocity, and protection (as well as the broadest possible target platform).

In the end, I suppose I agree with Tim Bray, the really big, long-term effects of this decision aren't easy to predict. After all, Java now "behaves" like Linux; one of the Java implementations could be forked to go into some very un-traditional directions, and who knows what kind of markets that might open up? As with Linux, anyone can build a support and maintenance business around a GPLed Java. Sun, no doubt, is betting that they can fit that bill better than anyone, but that's still up to the customer.

I suppose it's safe to say that a lot of interesting stuff will be happening here.

Link

Tags: Sun, Java, FSF, FOSS, GPL, open source, free software

[Cross-posted to Global Nerdy, a technology blog I co-write with Joey "AccordionGuy" deVilla. It has a lot less of this enterprise IT blah-de-blah, so why not stop by for a quick read?]

Yesterday saw Thomas PM "The Pentagon's New Map" Barnett post:

Consensus growing that Rumsfeld had to go to clear way for Baker's solution set to fly.

No big surprise there. Real clearing is Cheney's, with Rummy as surrogate.

Missing in the analysis so far: with caretaker in Pentagon, Baker now takes over de facto control of the war, as almost his own national security adviser, SECDEF AND SECSTATE.

No big whup for Gates. He knew that coming in. Quiet Hadley will do as told, as will Rice, but in reality, Rice's been replaced without leaving office. Imagine being SECSTATE and kicked off the one foreign policy issue that defines the administration.

Yes, yes, expect many protestations to the contrary and watch Baker go out of his way, using the study group as cover, not to upstage her.

But make no mistake, we now have caretakers (and not the real players) in both the Building and Foggy Bottom.

Sure enough, today's Times says:

The administration officials said that Mr. Bush was aware of Mr. Gates’s critique of current policy and understood that Mr. Gates planned to clear the “E Ring” of the Pentagon, where many of Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s senior political appointees have plotted Iraq strategy.

Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said Thursday afternoon that Mr. Bush regarded his choice of Mr. Gates as “a terrific opportunity” to rethink Iraq.

In doing so, Mr. Gates will be drawing on his experience and contacts from the administration of Mr. Bush’s father, including the former security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III. “Gates’s world is Brent Scowcroft and Baker and a whole bunch of people who felt the door had been slammed in their face,” one former official who has discussed Iraq at length with Mr. Gates said Thursday. “The door is about to reopen.”

About to reopen onto a world of realpolitik, and that might not be a good thing.

I fear any "solution" (if, in fact, new solutions are really in the offing) might entail engagement with Iran and Syria, asking them to, pretty please, leash their dogs in Iraq and seal the borders from their side. In addition to conjuring images of Lebanon after the (first) Israeli withdrawal, it brings the prospect of Iran's hardliners getting more than they ever dared dream: elimination of Saddam and the Taliban at no cost, de facto control over Iraq (bringing the edge of their control to the frontier of the Gulf Arab states and Jordan), and enough leverage with the United States to allow them to preserve much of their nuclear program.

In fact, this administration should have picked up the phone to talk turkey with Iran and Syria (and, perhaps Turkey, too—why the hell not?) right around the time they were going with the strong, silent type, and disparaging the "Axis of Evil." By belatedly coming around to the idea of engagement, they've made the realpolitikal options unpalatable.

The return of Bakerism to DC compounds the worst mistake of Bush II with the worst mistake of Bush I.

Tags: Gates, Rumsfeld, Baker, George W Bush, George HW Bush, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Thomas PM Barnett

I woke up to some sad news today: Microsoft, once the most feared company in the world, is a total wuss. They've cut a crazy deal with Universal Music Group to pay a $1 royalty for every Zune device they sell (in addition to any royalties for UMG music they actually manage to shift). The New York Times has the details:

In a rare move, Microsoft said yesterday that it had agreed to pay a percentage of the sales of its new portable media player to the Universal Music Group.

Universal Music, a unit of Vivendi, will receive a royalty on the Zune player in exchange for licensing its recordings for Microsoft’s new digital music service, the companies said.

UMG is shaking down the new kid on the digital music block, trying to get from them what they haven't been able to get from Apple: a cut of the hardware sales. Microsoft, desperate to have all the major labels on board, folded like a cheap suit, and set a precedent that'll affect their relationships with the other major labels (who probably have "most favored nation" clauses in their contracts with Redmond).

It's clear that the overriding motive for Microsoft was desperation:

In discussing the rationale for the royalty, Chris Stephenson, general manager for global marketing in Microsoft’s entertainment unit, said the company “needed people to rally behind” the new device and service.

“It’s a higher-level business relationship,” he said.

A higher level of punk-itude, maybe. Anyway, I'm sure it wasn't lost on anyone at Microsoft HQ that this would eventually make life tough for Apple when it came time to renegotiate their licenses with the majors.

The rationale for the major labels is simple: Apple's done better, in gross dollar and margin terms, from the hardware than they have from the music they've sold, and they want a piece of Apple's cake, too.

Remember, these companies have sold many of us the same music over and over again (In my case, I can pick out tracks on my iPod that I've bought on vinyl, tape, CD, and now as downloads). Apparently making money from the business they're supposed to be in isn't enough. The fact that every MB of disk space on an iPod isn't occupied by tracks from the iTunes Store  is all the backup UMG et al need to justify their position:

The move also reflects Universal’s recognition that, for all the runaway success of gadgets like the iPod, consumers are still not buying enough digital music to make up for declining sales of music on compact disk. Universal said it was only fair to receive payment on devices that may be repositories for stolen music.

“It’s a major change for the industry,” said David Geffen, the entertainment mogul who more than a decade ago sold the record label that bears his name to Universal. “Each of these devices is used to store unpaid-for material. This way, on top of the material people do pay for, the record companies are getting paid on the devices storing the copied music.”

He added: “It certainly changes the paradigm.”

Yes, from one where record labels got money for the music they sold, to one where they get money because they assume their customers are thieves.

It would appear that Universal's thirst for royalty justice is small, however: a one dollar royalty is, after all, the equivalent of one track per device. I'm with Om "GigaOm" Malik when he says:

If Apple had to pay at least $1 per device for every iPod sold over past two fiscal years, its cost would be $62 million at minimum: or about one more song per device. If music industry cannot sell one additional song to consumers (and has to blackmail for more money) then, you as a business, have lost grip over your core competency.

Which makes it all the more appalling that Microsoft has caved in. Surely Apple's precedent meant that they didn't have to.

Link

Tags: UMG, Microsoft, Zune, royalty, shakedown, Apple, iPod, Big Content

[Cross-posted from Global Nerdy, the tech blog I write with Joey "AccordionGuy" deVilla]

BusinessWeek is peddling a rumor that Michael Dell is tyring to handpick a new executive team to jumpstart his company's (relatively) moribund business:

Says one high-ranking executive from a Dell rival: "It has been clear for months that Rollins had lost external support, but my sense is that he has now lost internal support as well. Perhaps a CEO can lose one of the two temporarily, but never both."

A Dell spokesman says that the company is not seeking to replace Rollins. "Michael and Kevin have been involved in business decisions, in accessing talent, in interviewing talent, together," says spokesman Bob Pearson. "There's nothing new here. There's no change."

Pearson declined to comment in any detail on attempts to fill other senior positions at Dell. "We're always looking to grow teams at all levels. We're always interested in looking at top talent," he says.

So, the word from Dell is "Nothing to see here, everything is fine, all systems are normal." BusinessWeek, however, goes on to suggest that Dell's been looking to find some heavy-hitters to shore up a few weak spots in the business. Nothing major, just looking for executives to fix Dell's services, their marketing, design, and operations.

Wow. If you're bleeding in all those areas, why not just shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders, Mike?

Tags: Dell, Rollins, leadership

Microsoft's embrace of Novell's SUSE Linux looks like they're extending an olive branch to open source, but may really just be a step towards extinguishing Red Hat and VMware.

Microsoft Corp. and Novell Inc. today announced a set of broad business and technical collaboration agreements to build, market and support a series of new solutions to make Novell and Microsoft^® products work better together. The two companies also announced an agreement to provide each other’s customers with patent coverage for their respective products. These agreements will be in place until at least 2012. Under this new model, customers will realize unprecedented choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows^® and Linux.

“They said it couldn’t be done. This is a new model and a true evolution of our relationship that we think customers will immediately find compelling because it delivers practical value by bringing two of their most important platform investments closer together,” said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. “We’re excited to work with Novell, whose strengths include its heritage as a mixed-source company. Resolving our patent issues enables a combined focus on virtualization and Web services management to create new opportunities for our companies and our customers.”

The agreement begins with patent cross-coverage. Microsoft and Novell each pledge not to assert their patents against each other (or drag their customers into it) until at least 2012.

Technologically, the two companies say they will work together on three fronts. First, they'll collaborate on virtualization offerings. Second, they'll improve customers' ability to manage mixed SUSE and Windows environments by improving their respective system management tools and directory services. Third, they'll work on document format compatibility between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org.

Now, if this was truly a customer-driven initiative, it would make far more sense for Microsoft to have partnered with the company selling the top Linux distro in the enterprise, Red Hat. The fact that Microsoft's giving a boost to the #2 player (and just days after Oracle took a kick at Red Hat's core maintenance business) clearly begs for a second, cynical look. I think Alfresco's Matt Asay's onto something when he says:

Microsoft clearly does not view Novell as a threat. You don't link up with those that threaten to crush your business, not unless customers are demanding it. Given the relative market shares of Red Hat and Novell, it's a near certainty that if Linux and Windows integration is desirable (and it is, and customers are asking for it), then the most desirable partner for Microsoft (from a customer standpoint) would be Red Hat.

If SUSE gains from these agreements ("It's the Linux that Microsoft loves!"), it will come at the expense of Red Hat.

And while each element of this relationship is designed to, in some way, make life difficult for Red Hat, I think the virtualization aspect is also meant to address another of Microsoft's competitors. After all, as Mary Jo "All About Microsoft" Foley says, "Microsoft didn't need a special alliance with Novell in order to get Windows to run virtually on SUSE Linux or to make SUSE Linux to run on the Longhorn Server Hypervisor."

When you hear "Microsoft" and "virtualization" in the same sentence, it's usually a hint of Microsoft's pitched battle with VMware for the virtualization market. Thus far, Microsoft has had trouble dislodging the industry leader, but they're trying their damndest to change that with upcoming releases of Windows Server Longhorn and Windows Virtual Server. They're planning to optimize ("enlighten") how Windows Server Longhorn performs with their their "Viridian" hypervisor (all part of an ongoing overhaul of Windows Virtual Server), so a Windows guest OS will perform better than another guest OS (say, RHEL) running on Windows Virtual Server. VMware, of course isn't keen on Microsoft being able to tout a proprietary performance advantage for their server consolidation solutions. Does the Microsoft-Novell deal mean that SUSE will selectively be given access to Microsoft's optimizations, so that SUSE Linux outperforms Red Hat when running on a Viridian hypervisor? Not only would that ding Red Hat, it would also create some pain for VMware. (A related, but tangential question would be whether anything in this agreement will lead to a SUSE-controlled virtualization platform will be able to take advantage of Microsoft's Enlightenment API, thus allowing Windows Server Longhorn to run just as well on SUSE as it does when hosted on Windows Virtual Sever? That may mean licensing some very non-GPL code to XenSource, so we'll have to wait and see)

Destpite my getting into a speculative lather, I think this agreement nets out to a few things: Microsoft wants to put the boots to Red Hat, and if they can take on VMware too, so much the better. Novell's probably got intellectual property assets in operating systems (they own UNIX), networking, and office productivity that make them a formidable legal threat to Microsoft, so a patent truce is probably worth everyone's time. The technological points of collaboration as described don't seem so deep as to merit a formally announced relationship, so what gives? All we can do now is wait to see how it shakes out, and speculate in the interim.

Link

Tags: Microsoft, Novell, Windows, Linux, SUSE, virtualization, VMWare, patents

[Cross-posted from Global Nerdy, the everyday technology blog I write with Joey deVilla. Normally I'd put my thoughts on enterprise IT-type stuff here, but Joey asked if I had an opinion on this deal. Who am I to refuse?]

Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot, is a happy little goblin today:

OK, I can finally blurt it out: JotSpot is now part of Google, and I couldn't be more excited.

As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online. Then when we had conversations with people at Google we found ourselves completing each other's sentences. Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google's scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people.

This is a bigger deal from a business user and enterprise standpoint than for the individual user, but those lines are getting blurrier all the time.

While JotSpot's current pre-built application portfolio (calendaring, spreadsheets, text processing) may look redundant for Google, it actually expands Google Apps for Your Domain, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets by adding custom application development on a wiki framework—ideal when virtual teams working on projects together need something that the pre-built Google suite doesn't quite deliver.

It also allows JotSpot to go places it otherwise couldn't, thanks to Google's ad-driven revenue model. JotSpot will now be free.

TechCrunch's take on the deal adds the following forward-looking question about Google's rush to fill out their team productivity and collaboration services suite:

If Jotspot can be integrated as smoothly as so many other Google web applications have been, it will go a long ways towards strengthening Google for the upcoming web collaboration wars. How much longer until a web conferencing company is acquired?

This is yet another deal where Yahoo! was rumored to be a suitor, but Google wound up getting the girl.

Link

Tags: wiki, web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, JotSpot, Google, collaboration

[This has been cross-posted from Global Nerdy, a technology blog I write with Joey deVilla]

There was a man whose tears could cure cancer or any other disease, including the real cause of all diseases – sin. His blood did. His name was Jesus, not Chuck Norris.

If your soul needs healing, the prescription you need is not Chuck Norris' tears, it's Jesus' blood.

An actual quote from Chuck Norris' first column for theocon netrag WorldNetDaily.com.

I'm at a loss for words.

Tags: Chuck Norris, theocon, WTF?

Jack Davis, the multimillionaire businessman running here in western New York to unseat one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress, makes his fellow Democrats a little nervous.

Mr. Davis is prone to overstatement. He has warned about “Red China,” for example, and suggested he would take a bat to anyone who sent his sons sexually explicit e-mail messages like those a congressman sent to young male pages.

He defies liberal orthodoxies. He has said he wants to “seal” the nation’s borders and has held memberships in conservative groups like the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

We're seeing Democrats who love guns, who go to church, who want to kick Iran and North Korea where it hurts, who want to play hardball with China. Democratic success in Congress may only lead to intra-party warfare between the rump blue-staters and old-line "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," and their new conservative comrades.

Link

Tags: Democrats, GOP, conservative

• Is It the Target Demo, the Community, or Just the Lack of Dead Trees?
• Jobs: Microsoft Zune is Girl Repellent
• Toshiba Sets Their Display to Ludicrous Size
• Superspyware Me!
• Friendster's Recipe for Mediocrity
• Back to the Future: Steve Jobs Demos NeXTSTEP 3
• Flash Drive-Equipped Laptops Appear in Japan
• Compare Rental Rates in Your 'Hood with Rentometer
• Apple's iWork to Lasso Spreasheets
• Two Great Tastes That Taste Great (via Bluetooth)

You'll come out of pity, but you'l return out of mild interest.

Tags: Global Nerdy, self-promotion

America's Dumbest Congressmen

525 names short, I think.

Tags: politics

Book: Bush Aides Called Evangelicals 'Nuts'

A new book by a former White House official says that President Bush's top political advisors privately ridiculed evangelical supporters as "nuts" and "goofy" while embracing them in public and using their votes to help win elections.

Political operatives not always sincere, often cynical. Treat true believers as useful idiots.

Stop the presses.

Tags: Bush, GOP, Rove, Kuo, Christian conservatives

I want to end this post on an optimistic note, so let's concentrate on the biggest advantage Enterprise 2.0 technologies have over email. As I wrote in my initial SMR article, email is a channel technology.  It creates a private conduit between the sender and receiver.  Other parties don't know that the email was sent, and can't consult its contents.   Wikis, del.icio.us, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube, on the other hand, are all platform technologies.  They accumulate content over time and make it visible and accessible to all community members.  

Prior to the arrival of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, companies had few effective platforms for sharing knowledge work, and no platforms that fostered emergence.  So the new tools are not direct substitutes for email; instead, they're intended to provide capabilities that email can't.  Will they succeed?  It depends  heavily, I believe, on whether companies and their managers want technology platforms for collaboration.  This desire will be an important factor in solving email's 9X problem.

"9X" refers to just how much improvement a typical user must see to be persuaded to switch from an existing solution to a new one. The early adopters of web 2.0-style work in the enterprise have a much, much lower threshold for this kind of thing. As a consequence, they tend to overestimate the speed with which any new technology will be broadly adopted.

Does that mean the enterprise will always settle for the tools they have, like Outlook and Office? Not necessarily. I believe we're seeing a senior management-level desire for innovation accelerated by collaboration. Think of how P&G is constantly singled out for breaking down the barriers between product groups to help the company deliver new products more quickly, or how Jeff Immelt's GE is as much about innovation as Jack Welch's was about operational excellence. That should provide the support for changes in the technology platforms workers use for collaboration. Whether companies elect to create those platforms soon out of new tools like wikis, blogs, search engines, and tagging, or wait for established enterprise IT vendors like Microsoft, EMC, IBM, Oracle, and SAP to subsume similar features into their existing offerings is an open question, of course.

As McAfee points out in his very next post, large companies don't necessarily make the decisions individual users on the internet might about the appropriate technological solution to a problem:

[Enterprise IT efforts] are not about the users, even though they're often positioned and discussed that way. They're about the enterprise --  what's best for the organization as a whole, what will make it more productive, efficient, analyzable, etc.  

There's no guarantee that what's best for the enterprise will be best for all or most enterprise IT users.  In fact, there's a near guarantee that some people and groups will be worse off after a new enterprise system (ERP, CRM, eProcurement, SCM, etc.) goes in.  They'll get an application that's by definition less tailored to their specific needs than the legacy stovepipe system that's being replaced.  They'll have to learn new screens, transactions, and processes, some of which are going to be less friendly or efficient than the previous ones.  They'll have to go through lots of training that takes them away from their jobs.  And at the end of the day they'll be encouraged (read 'forced') to use an enterprise application that gives them  fewer places to hide and less freedom.

Link

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, wiki, blog, tagging, enterprise IT

Google today retired the Writely name and look and feel, replacing it with the cumbersome "Google Docs & Spreadsheets."

Writely users won't notice much in the way of new functionality; Google's main focus has been combining users' lists of their documents and spreadsheets into one view and keying them off their Google account (which also means a single method for sharing documents and spreadsheets with collaborators). The top left corner of your Google pages is starting to get crowded with all the services Google offers: Google, Gmail, Calendar, Photos, Docs & Spreadsheets...

Google bought Writely in March of this year, so this integration took eight months. Pretty speedy. Yahoo!, by comparison, bought Oddpost in July 2004 but it took them until September 2006—over two years—to roll the new Ajax-ified Yahoo! Mail out to the general public. Similarly, other Yahoo! acquisitions like Flickr and del.icio.us still live in splendid isolation from Yahoo!'s other services.

An unfair comparison? Perhaps. Nevertheless, these kinds of comparisons are a big reason why people are saying Yahoo! is quickly losing its edge to Google.

Link.

Tags: Google, Writely, office 2.0, web 2.0, spreadsheets, Yahoo!

[I'm cross-posting this from Global Nerdy, a tech-ish blog I've started with my friend Joey deVilla. Stop by and see how it's coming along.]

New USA BFFL, Libya, is joining Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, and Thailand in the One Laptop Per Child program.

The government of Libya reached an agreement on Tuesday with One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit United States group developing an inexpensive, educational laptop computer, with the goal of supplying machines to all 1.2 million Libyan schoolchildren by June 2008.

Discussions between the One Laptop project and the Libyan government began as part of work being done by the Monitor Group, an international consulting firm co-founded by the economist Michael E. Porter. It is now helping the Libyans develop a national economic plan.

A million Libyan kids will soon be disappointed to find out they can't play Half-Life 2: Episode One.

Link.

Tags: OLPC, Libya, globalization

[I'm cross-posting this from Global Nerdy, a tech-ish blog I've started with my friend Joey deVilla. Stop by and see how it's coming along.]

In another bamboozling move, MySpace has now blocked Stickam webcam codes. At the end of last week, the team reported that newly-created Stickam widgets wouldn’t work on MySpace, and yesterday I was forwarded an email (thanks James) from Stickam that claimed the widgets had been “blocked” by MySpace. I assumed that they were being affected by some kind of glitch that prevents Flash embeds working properly - something along the lines of the MySpace update that broke many Flash widgets (it was supposedly a reaction to the MySpace hack). As it turns out, there’s something more sinister afoot: today I logged in to MySpace and realized that all links to Stickam are being blocked. If you try to link to Stickam.com anywhere on your profile - either inserting a widget or using a plain old link, it will be removed. Apparently it’s been this way for a few days. Since only links to Stickam.com are affected, it seems that MySpace is intentionally blocking the service.

Never underestimate the potential for greed to cloud the vision: MySpace could indeed be wondering why they should let some third party build a business on the back of their popularity. Of course, the response would be that MySpace's popularity is, at least in part, due to how these widgets add to the MySpace user's experience, allowing them to truly customize their MySpace pages.

On the other hand, never underestimate the potential for fear to cloud the vision, either: MySpace may not actually care about Stickam's widgets from a competitive perspective—they may very well want to play an open game here. They may, however, care very much about what images may be broadcast through these widgets; imagine the headlines when a parent finds out their teenage kid has been flashing their friends. Whose name do you think the media will sieze on: Stickam or MySpace?

Link.

Tags: Stickam, widgets, MySpace

[I'm cross-posting this from Global Nerdy, a tech-ish blog I've started with my friend Joey deVilla. Stop by and see how it's coming along.]

Speaking with reporters on the opening day of the CEATEC exhibition in Chiba, Japan, Eric Kim, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Home Group, today praised Apple Computer Inc. for successfully integrating computers and consumer electronics with its iPod digital music player and iTunes online store, which use proprietary standards.

However, at the same time, he also called on Japanese consumer electronics makers to adopt open standards centered on Intel's own Viiv platform for PCs running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

Intel's going to have a lot of these "Lost in Translation" moments, where they attempt to serve (and praise) one small customer (Apple) who has been pummelling a lot of their larger customers in the converging consumer electronics business (Everybody Else).

Take, for example, this business of "open standards." If Viiv was really an open standard, then I could mix and match chip suppliers (swapping out Intel for AMD) and operating systems (Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows XP Media Center or Vista). Sure, Viiv is more open than the iPod/iTunes/iTunes Store system, but not so open as to release a company like Sony or Dell from vendor lock-in with Intel and Microsoft.

Link.

Tags: Intel, Apple, iPod, consumer electronics, open standards, Viiv

[I'm cross-posting this from Global Nerdy, a tech-ish blog I've started with my friend Joey deVilla. Stop by and see how it's coming along.]

We're thrilled to have our Mac team in place, and they're just getting started. Watch this blog to keep up with the latest about everything Google is doing to support Mac users.

Google? Mac? Blog? Three words I like individually, together at last.

Tags: Google, Apple, Mac, blog

[I'm cross-posting this from Global Nerdy, a tech-ish blog I've started with my friend Joey deVilla. Stop by and see how it's coming along.]

“If you believe it’s the future of television, it’s clearly worth $1.6 billion,” Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, said of YouTube. “If you believe something else, you could write down maybe it’s not worth much at all.”

So says Uncle Fester, and he's right.

I suppose everyone's got a take on Google's purchase of YouTube, so here's mine: $1.6 billion is an insane amount of money for Google to spend on YouTube, the stand-alone business model, but it's a pretty cheap way to buy yourself into the future of entertainment.

Google's core business is putting an audience in touch with the information they want, and slathering the whole experience with ads that are somehow tuned to the individual reader's interests. They're quickly dominating that business with regards to text, but the web sure isn't limited to alphanumeric characters. Since YouTube is beginning to dominate the way people search for, discover, watch, and share video on the internet, it makes sense for Google to bring that network into the fold. As I've said before, the new network looks more like Google than it does ABC, CBS, or NBC.

And while the existing dominant players in video entertainment (the broadcast and cable networks, and their production partners) slowly adopt digital distribution strategies, I suspect smaller independent producers will start to see the large reach, digital word-of-mouth, searchability, and potential for revenue presented by a Google/YouTube-mediated network as an increasingly interesting option.

Link.

Tags: Google, YouTube, media

[I'm cross-posting this from Global Nerdy, a tech-ish blog I've started with my friend Joey deVilla. Stop by and see how it's coming along.]