Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

LEIGH DROGEN: It is a fact of life that eventually, all platforms die.

Platforms are powerful, they put people in the same place, crowds of people in and of themselves are powerful. Platforms provide a common place where we can exchange ideas, goods, and services.

Platforms are great businesses.

Facebook is a platform. It is not the first social platform where ordinary people were put in one room and allowed to exchange information freely. Facebook stood on the shoulders of Myspace and Friendster, then it crushed them under its sheer weight.

All platforms die, because all platforms eventually suffer from their own success. Innovative platforms open doors to new entrepreneurs who are able to build better platforms. Ideas spawn ideas. Platforms also suffer from the loss of innovative drive. A platform is what a platform is and isn’t anything else. Once a platform decides that it wants to be something else, it is almost certain to have a crisis of identity, and not many platforms survive to see their next act (see Myspace).

Twitter gave print media the final kick over the cliff, then spawned StockTwits. StockTwits spawned Estimize. Who knows what will come next.

But I do know this, all platforms die, and Facebook’s head is currently on the chopping block.

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The Internet is working fine without Obama. Does anyone think Obama will improve it with these new rules?

ASSOCIATED PRESS: The White House on Thursday is expected to unveil its proposal to enhance the nation’s cybersecurity, laying out plans to require industry to better protect systems that run critical infrastructure like the electrical grid, financial systems and nuclear power plants.

The Obama administration also is insisting that companies tell consumers when their personal information has been compromised.

According to cybersecurity experts familiar with the plan, the administration’s proposed legislation also would instruct federal agencies to more closely monitor their computer networks.

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LA TIMES: Edward Zuckerberg, who taught his son programming on the family’s Atari 800, runs a dental office with Internet TV, iPods for patients and an implant fabrication machine. And he uses a little marketing tool called Facebook.

Edward Zuckerberg pulls his iPhone out of his jeans pocket and hits the familiar blue Facebook icon.

He’s eager to show off his latest effort to market his suburban dental practice. The man known as “Painless Dr. Z” is offering a free teeth bleaching kit to the first 10 patients who use their smartphones to tell their Facebook friends that they’ve stopped by his office.

On the receptionist’s desk, a blue sticker exhorts clients to “‘Like’ us on Facebook.” The effort has paid off. The dental practice has more than 1,100 fans.

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U.K. DAILY MAIL: It’s only a few short steps. But for Steve Jobs, it is heartbreakingly clear that they cost him.

Video footage has emerged of the gaunt Apple boss negotiating the path from a café to his car – a journey that appears both painful and disorienting.

Pictures of Mr Jobs out in California with his wife Laurene, published on Mail Online yesterday, have already prompted financial analysts to ask serious questions about his health.

But now the video that accompanies the pictures has also emerged on the internet.

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JACOB ARON-NEW SCIENTIST: A new cyberweapon could take down the entire internet – and there’s not much that current defences can do to stop it. So say Max Schuchard at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and his colleagues, the masterminds who have created the digital ordnance. But thankfully they have no intention of destroying the net just yet. Instead, they are suggesting improvements to its defences.

Schuchard’s new attack pits the structure of the internet against itself. Hundreds of connection points in the net fall offline every minute, but we don’t notice because the net routes around them. It can do this because the smaller networks that make up the internet, known as autonomous systems, communicate with each other through routers. When a communication path changes, nearby routers inform their neighbours through a system known as the border gateway protocol (BGP). These routers inform other neighbours in turn, eventually spreading knowledge of the new path throughout the internet.

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I lose my phone all the time.

So for me, this is almost as good an invention as sliced bread.

If you’ve lost your phone, go here >>>

NEW YORK TIMES: The Dimona complex in the Negev desert is famous as the heavily guarded heart of Israel’s never-acknowledged nuclear arms program, where neat rows of factories make atomic fuel for the arsenal.

Over the past two years, according to intelligence and military experts familiar with its operations, Dimona has taken on a new, equally secret role — as a critical testing ground in a joint American and Israeli effort to undermine Iran’s efforts to make a bomb of its own.

Behind Dimona’s barbed wire, the experts say, Israel has spun nuclear centrifuges virtually identical to Iran’s at Natanz, where Iranian scientists are struggling to enrich uranium. They say Dimona tested the effectiveness of the Stuxnet computer worm, a destructive program that appears to have wiped out roughly a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges and helped delay, though not destroy, Tehran’s ability to make its first nuclear arms.

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FOX NEWS: Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple, announced he was taking another medical leave of absence Monday, leading to new speculation about what could be wrong with his health.

No further information about his condition was provided, but this is not the first time Jobs, 55, has taken a medical leave of absence.

In 2004, he took time off to recover from surgery to treat a very rare form of pancreatic cancer — called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor. In 2009, he took a six-month medical leave from January to June to have a liver transplant.
About 85 to 90 percent of people who have liver transplants will be alive one year later, and about 75 to 85 percent of people will survive at least five years after a transplant, the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) said on its website.

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Why Steve Jobs is so Fascinating

CNN: To many tech fanatics, Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is a mythical hero — a technological savior who has been compared to Jesus on several occasions.
To outsiders, however, it may not be obvious exactly why Jobs is so fascinating — and why news about his new medical leave of absence, announced Monday, is causing reverberations in the tech blogosphere that extend far beyond get-well-soon notes.

Jobs, who is notoriously tight-lipped about Apple and his personal life, has nevertheless been the subject of numerous magazine, newspaper and website profiles — as well as a TV movie, “Pirates of Silicon Valley,” that dramatized his rivalry with Microsoft’s Bill Gates.

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U.K. TELEGRAPH: A succession of multiple cyber-attacks could “become a full-scaleglobal shock” on a par with a pandemic and the collapse of the world financial system, the report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said.

Contingency plans to recover systems should be put in place and cybersecurity policies should “encompass the needs of all citizens and not just central government facilities”, the report said.

“What should concern policy-makers are combinations of events – two different cyber-events occurring at the same time, or a cyber-event taking place during some other form of disaster or attack,” the report said.

“In that eventuality, ‘perfect storm’ conditions could exist.”

But the report, part of a wider OECD project on Future Global Shocks, found “few single foreseeable cyber-related events have the capacity to become a full-scale global shock”.

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