Archive for March 16th, 2010
How US Government Spies Use Facebook
The US Department of Justice this week released slides from a presentation deck titled Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites . The document was released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) . The DoJ presentation describes Facebook as much more co-operative with law enforcement requests for user information than Twitter and MySpace are. It also explains to officers what the advantages of going undercover on social networking sites are. The EFF posted IRS training documents for using various internet tools as well, including Google Street View, but those were much tamer than the Justice file. Sponsor Highlights from the deck include: On “getting info from Facebook” – options include photos, contact info, group contact info and IP logs. “HOWEVER, Facebook has other data available.” The deck notes that Facebook is “often cooperative with emergency requests.” MySpace and Twitter, on the other hand, are described differently. MySpace “requires a search warrant for private messages/bulletins less than 181 days old.” Twitter “will not preserve data without legal process,” has a “stated policy of producing data only in response to legal process” and has no Law Enforcement Guide (or spying manual, as some parties call such documents). Wouldn’t you like your social network to say no before it says yes and require a warrant before handing over information to law enforcement? We reached out to Facebook this evening about the government claim that it was unusually co-operative but have not yet received a response. Funny: As social networks go, LinkedIn’s “use for criminal communications appears limited” the document says. You don’t say. LinkedIn can be useful in finding expert witnesses, however. “Why go undercover on Facebook, MySpace, etc?” the document asks. Three reasons are offered: 1. Communicate with suspects/targets. 2. Gain access to non-public info. 3. Map social relationships/networks. “If agents violate terms of service,” the document asks, “is that ‘otherwise illegal activity’?” No answer is offered in the text. “Many witnesses have social-networking pages,” the presentation notes. Those pages can be a “valuable source of info on defense witnesses” and “potential pitfalls for government witnesses.” Also funny: DoJ prosectors are urged to “use caution in ‘friending’ judges, defense counsel.” We expect the Electronic Frontier Foundation to offer further analysis in coming days. You can download a PDF of the document yourself here . For further discussion of these documents, see blog posts clustered on Techmeme . Discuss
Oops: Google Denied Trademark on Android Nexus One
It’s been a rough day for Google’s Android phone, the Nexus One. First we learned this morning that initial sales have been far weaker than the iPhone saw when it first came out of the gate. Now it’s being reported that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected its application for a trademark on the name Nexus One. The name “Nexus One” was ruled too close to Portland, Oregon based Integra Telecom’s own registered trademark for its Nexus fixed bandwidth integrated voice and internet T1 product . Sponsor Mike Rogoway, of Portland’s The Oregonian newspaper, got the following statement from Integra: “We appreciate that the PTO is protecting our trademark rights. Integra has over $60 Million in annual revenue associated with our Nexus brand and it represents millions of new revenue for the company each year. Google hasn’t contacted us since the PTO issued its objection but we hope we can work together to achieve our respective business goals.” Does that mean Google will rename the Nexus One, or that it will end up paying the trademark holder for the privilege of using the name? Google just expanded the Nexus One onto the AT&T network today. Either way, we wouldn’t be surprised if the hunt for a new name is already on. What would you suggest, readers? It’s tempting to say this is another example of the Patent and Trademark Office moving too slow, but note that Integra was granted its trademark in December 2008. The Nexus One was just release January 5, 2010. Meanwhile, the open Android operating system marches on. XML co-creator Tim Bray announced this weekend that he has joined Google to work on Android. He called the iPhone in a blog post “a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.” Discuss
4 Technology Partners And What They Say About the IBM Cloud
The IBM Cloud is a prototype of the ecosystem we expect to see emerge in the world of cloud services. It has the flavor of other platform environments, with the primary goal of integrating IBM with third-party applications to serve developers and end customers. It is the partners that tie into the larger ecosystems, often existing on multiple platforms. The healthy platforms will resemble coral reefs in which the partners are important to the cloud ecosystem as the platform itself. Sponsor But what is the importance of these third-party applications and what do they say about the future of IBM Cloud? RightScale RightScale http://rightscale.com is becoming a power in its own right. The San Diego-based company provides a sought after need. The capability to port applications to the cloud. RightScale is playing across the market. It has served as an important partner for Amazon Web Services in helping companies deploy cloud-based applications in the cloud. As part of an IBM ecosystem, the company will be one of those go to services that helps manage the cloud’s inherent complexities. Kaavo Kaavo is another cloud management application that leverages its position as a service that according to the web site, provides “middleware on demand.”That’s a fascinating example of how entire infrastructures are moving off premise and into cloud environments. For instance, Kaavo makes the claim that it can bring online one or multiple server systems, configure middleware and deploy applications The result being that people may use the IBM platform to set up and tear down test and and development environments within minutes. Again, we see how IBM is seeking to provide services that serve the needs of the developer or IT manager looking for more efficient and powerful ways t leverage its assets in a private cloud environment or in a public cloud. Silanis Silanis fits in the e-signature market. In January, the company announced services that integrate with IBM’s LotusLive. The service allows companies to work with customers in an extranet environment where contracts may be reviewed, modified and electronically signed. The service would seem to fit with IBM’s efforts to create a transaction environment within IBM Cloud. Aviarc IBM is partnering with several application developers, including Aviarc , a custom software application developer for on-premise, private cloud, appliances or the multi-tenant environment of IBM Cloud. These are just samplings of the ecosystem that IBM is developing. You can tell that IBM is following its strategy to serve hybrid environments and establish its platform as a place where developers may build, test, sell and distribute applications. Discuss
Rulers of the Cloud: Will Amazon’s Computing Fabric Become a New Economy?
This is the third entry in our exploratory series ” Will One Company Dominate the Cloud “. Today we’re blinking twice after reviewing the innovation engine at Amazon. The Amazon AWS product is all about services. While others are marketing the cloud with an explanation point, the cloud leader is focused on the raw building blocks. This includes everything from storage to people. Amazon is learning how to find new ways to optimize connections and monetize them in increments of time. Sponsor Amazon, the Verb: Motion When thinking of Amazon as a verb, one word stands out, motion. When Amazon was first introduced as the Internet bookstore, it immediately created a change in the landscape. It seemed like the writing was on the wall for brick and mortar retail, and to a large degree, it was. In a mere 15 years, it has disrupted the entire book vertical with an end-to-end digital system. Amazon is now in the position to completely automate the flow of content bits from upstream to downstream. Now let’s look at the AWS services to see if can it do the same for computing. We’ll analyze the services Amazon offers and how they work together, specifically in four areas: computing, storage, networking, and people. (Although we didn’t include several areas in this roundup, including database and monitoring, we see them as clear signs of momentum and scope of Amazon’s evolution.) Compute We signed up (again, as a new user,) for EC2 to refresh ourselves with its offerings and to remind ourselves what it means to be utility-based. Amazon defines workload in relationship to the types of instances the company offers in the EC2 solution. Windows on EC2 is optimized around bringing a three-tier Windows web environment into the Amazon stack. It supports ASP.Net, AJAX, IIS, and SQL Server. Amazon has also tuned it’s network and storage offerings to nicely plug into the Windows on EC2 package and offer seamless integration with existing Amazon EC2 features like Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Amazon CloudWatch, Elastic-Load Balancing, and Elastic IPs. IBM WebSphere is also supported on EC2 , and hosts a lineup of enterprise computing tools including the WebSphere Server, Portal Server, DB2, Tivoli Monitoring, and Data Quality products. IBM mentions that one of the targets is getting developers to use this model for getting development or proof-of-concepts projects up and running quickly. The patterns for firing up a new instance are defined as AMI (Amazon Managed Instances) so the software has been appropriately targeted the infrastructure instance it will run within. IBM and Amazon have set up Have extra licenses, or want to retire legacy hardware? IBM has an agreement with Amazon to allow you to migrate your licenses to EC2. The EC2 MapReduce is a service that targets large data streams and optimizing processing of these data sets. It leverages the Hadoop Map Reduce project and provides as an example of breaking the computer entirely into services. The Map Reduce service doesn’t just host an application stack, but is automatically configured using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This is an example of an open-source implementation project (though Apache) optimizing in such a way that it fits on the EC2 stack as a core feature, and it has become a peer to the WebSphere or .Net patterns. Storage The storage offerings include S3, Elastic Block Storage, and Input/Output. Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) has been out there several years serving web based applications as their simple cloud away from home. Customers of it have famously stood up their entire data solution for images and other key storage tasks based on Amazon’s S3 service. It’s popular, well known, and evolving to include additional features that enforce data level integrity like databases. Elastic Block Storage is another storage service offered by Amazon. Instead of being a simple, writable data service in the cloud like S3, it is focused on EC2 instances that need storage as part of their footprint. An EBS can be built alongside the EC2 instance that is 1GB to 1TB in size and can be mounted from that service. This is designed for applications that expect raw physical storage locally addressed by the server. Network Amazon offers Elastic Load Balancing . Considering Amazon’s power as an elastic compute provider, this is a critical piece of the puzzle. Here, load can be configured to continually monitor and self heal across a set of hosts, moving the resources towards optimal performance. The company also offers Virtual Private Cloud , which enables an enterprise to segment access to a portion of Amazon’s cloud with access control and security enforcements (such as subnet, encrypted VPN). People An amazing thing about all of these services coming from Amazon, is that Amazon is a consumer facing company with an amazing relationship with consumers. Amazon has the ability to learn about us. We share our ideology (books we buy), lifestyle (products we consume), and financial position (credit cards we use). The company has also implemented an important part of identifying consumers by going deeper with services and verifying identity. The company implements a two-factor signup process that goes the extra step in granting authorization to a user to change compute resources. This second factor gives Amazon some assurance that the person really is that person, because in addition to getting the credit card and password (which are network resources), it also calls out to your phone to verify that the person logging in to the network has the phone (physical resource) at the same time. Here is step one: Signup Here is step two: Verify PIN on your mobile phone: And, step three, proceed (you are now free to spin up resources): When combining these two things together, Amazon is in a position to easily bring its current customer base to a two-factor security solution, and providing a service that meets government level controls. And, with two factor credentials it’s less likely that there will be automated bots being deployed in Amazon’s cloud by scripts or hackers. Amazon is in the unique position to view the next generation computing fabric from the consumer sales process. Amazon may be the only company in a position to see how it all pieces together, even perhaps a longer view of the future supply chain than its new book competitor, Apple. In addition to consumers and developers, Amazon also has the power of people as resources, with the Mechanical Turk marketplace. Need a simple task completed and queued for the Internet (of people) to execute on? Get started with one of these sample scripts and draw legions to your command. We find it compelling that Amazon has connected consumers, verified individuals, and tasks to be executed on. These pieces are perhaps foundations for a broad appetite for connecting workers with resources and optimizing along with way. Banking with Amazon – or – Selling Time Instead of Licenses The time value of money is the value of money figuring in a given amount of interest earned over a given amount of time. When signing up for the AWS features as a new user, we found ourselves asking looking at pricing options that reminded us of bank products. Earn more by committing to 1, 2, or 3 years. Are the Amazon Web Services an economy, and the individual services themselves currency? First, let’s look at Microsoft and its revenue. A server is sold, Microsoft gets a piece by the sell of the OS. Part of this business model is very predictable (company gets x% of all PC shipments. And part of it is a bit lumpy. Where consumers have choices, they may choose to exercise them. For example, choosing Google Docs as an alternate to Microsoft Office, or bypassing an entire OS update, such as Vista. These choices represent risk to Microsoft in its revenue position. Amazon, is increasingly using something more predictable to sell it’s services, time. And the nice thing about time, is that it’s always ticking. So, instead of waiting for an entire “new PC”, or “OS update”, Amazon’s implementation of selling resources is triggered to contracts. And, if this works, the consumer of the risk chooses the service longevity and the risk is reduced for Amazon. To put this in financial terms, the time value of money states. “The method also allows the valuation of a likely stream of income in the future, in such a way that the annual incomes are discounted and then added together, thus providing a lump-sum “present value” of the entire income stream.” What this means, is that Amazon is going to understand value for its AWS users over the entire life of their contract and can start to model interaction patterns against future events. For example, if Amazon knows you have a 3 year contract for EC2, but you’re 50% more likely to renew it if it also has SimpleDB services, it can trigger events and discounts based on these service connections. Here we see the EC2 reserved instance pricing chart. There is heavy discounting for committing to a term. From what we see, Amazon will be successful in gaining new efficiencies in pricing of computing resources, like it did with books. We expect the company to successfuly squeeze out hard costs that exist in the middle. We feel that Amazon is the quiet cloud company that you can “go long” with in terms of it’s future value. Like the market itself, Amazon is a prime innovator in sharing the future into the terms of the present. Will cloud computing re-factor how we look at the technology stack for good, and will “payment” be in the middle? If so, is time the business model? Photo credit: wwworks Discuss
Internet of Things Explained (Video)
IBM’s Smarter Planet team has created a great 5 minute video explaining the emerging trend of Internet of Things, an exciting topic ReadWriteWeb has and will continue to cover frequently and in depth . Internet of Things is about, as the video explains, the coming future when there are more “things” on the Internet (sensors especially) than there are people. The result of that will be “a kind of global data field” the video says. “If we can actually begin to see the patterns in the data, then we have a much better chance of getting our arms around this. That’s where societies become more efficient, that’s where more innovation is sparked.” Check out this artistic, succinct, optimistic and inspiring video explaining what could well become a big factor in how the future unfolds. Sponsor This is heavy stuff, clearly aimed to fostering positive and substantial cultural change through technology – by opening up a new plane of options for humanity. Of course there’s little critique of this movement in videos like this; that’s something we’re still exploring but we imagine surveillance is one down side. There’s also some risk of paying so much attention to our machines that we lose track of the joy of engaging directly with the world around us . The upside as described in the video is big, though. “When we talk about a smarter planet, you can say that it has two dimensions. One is to be more efficient, be less destructive, to connect different aspects of life which do affect each other in more conscience and deliberate and intelligent ways. But the other is also to generate fundamentally new insights, new activity, new forms of social relations. So you could look at the planet as an information, creation and transmission system, and the universe was hearing its information but we werent. But increasingly now we can, early days, baby steps days, but we can actually begin to hear the planet talking to us.” To track this trend across multiple vendors, check out ReadWriteWeb’s Internet of Things archive . Photo by Svilen Milev . Discuss