Category Archives: Future Developments?
VeriSign to censor domains using a totally untested “rapid suspension” system?
DEFRA Warns of Threat to UK WiFi and Fibre Optic Networks by Climate Change
WSJ: Microsoft to buy Skype for $7bn. Rest of world: for real?
The Swedish streaming music company Spotify is looking to start offering movies, too
FBI Hunting Down World Of Warcraft Gold Farmers?
Will the ‘Age of America’ end in 2016?
According to the figures, the Chinese economy would grow from $11.2 trillion in 2011 to $19 trillion in 2016. Over the same period, the U.S. economy will rise from a dominant $15.2 trillion to a trailing $18.8 trillion.
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/BUSINESS/04/26/us.china.economy/index.html?hpt=C1
Google and Spotify Discussing Possibility of Launching Mega Streaming Music Service
Keeping secret the work of 2,000 persons in the age of Internet is just impossible
Alleged LHC Memo Hints Scientists Have Found the Elusive Higgs Boson
Is Google Prepping YouTube for Game Consoles?
The white light technology that could finally make 3D awesome – without glasses
Is Facebook Planning Facial-Recognition For Photos?
The Near-Future of Mobile Gaming Is Going to Be Pretty Epic
A surge in Satanism fuelled by the internet has led to a sharp rise in the demand for exorcists, the Roman Catholic Church has warned
Cameron is seriously considering shooting the second and third ‘Avatar’ movies at either 48 or 60 fps. With this higher frame rate, he’s hoping to transcend 3-D, and move into an entirely new realm of cinematic reality
How do you program something that will eventually have god-like intelligence to think a certain way when that day comes?
The word is that the US Department of Justice may sue Google over its proposed $700m acquisition of flight data outfit ITA Software. And we can only hope that the feds have far more than flight data on the brain
As it investigates whether Google could use its web search monopoly to erect a second monopoly in the flight search market, the DoJ must also ask whether the company could do much the same thing in who knows how many other markets
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/25/google_and_the_feds/
Google spends $1 million on censorship and throttling detection
Google is paying Georgia Tech researchers to build consumer tools that can detect Internet throttling and government censorship, for both home and mobile devices. At the end of the project, the Georgia Tech team hopes to provide “a suite of Web-based, Internet-scale measurement tools that any user around the world could access for free.
With the help of these tools, users could determine whether their ISPs are providing the kind of service customers are paying for, and whether the data they send and receive over their network connections is being tampered with by governments and/or ISPs.”
Streaming music overtaking ownership models in five years
the developments in music consumption
Google as US Commerce Secretary?
BT vs Sky vs Virgin – Top pay-telly providers go head to head
TiVo Adding Slingbox Functionality Into Their Next DVR?
A rare rift has developed between national governments and the nonprofit organization that oversees Internet domain names, with neither side showing signs of backing down in a dispute that includes trademarks and free expression
In a statement released over the weekend, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, listed 23 areas of continued disagreement over the rules for approving new top-level domain names. Hundreds of applications for these suffixes are expected later this year, including .car, .love, .movie, .web, and .gay.
ICANN chairman Peter Thrush wrote (PDF) that his organization “has made a good faith effort toward narrowing the outstanding issues,” which were debated at a meeting in Brussels last week. The formal “consultation”–unprecedented in ICANN’s 13-year history–is expected to resume at ICANN’s meeting in San Francisco that starts March 13.
The migration towards IPv6, which has been made necessary by the expansion of the internet, will make it harder to filter spam messages, service providers warn
While this expansion allows far more devices to have a unique internet address, it creates a host of problems for security service providers, who have long used databases of known bad IP addresses to maintain blacklists of junk mail cesspools. Spam-filtering technology typically uses these blacklists as one (key component) in a multi-stage junk mail filtering process that also involves examining message contents.
“The primary method for stopping the majority of spam used by email providers is to track bad IP addresses sending email and block them – a process known as IP blacklisting,” explained Stuart Paton, a senior solutions architect at spam-filtering outfit Cloudmark. “With IPv6 this technique will no longer be possible and could mean that email systems would quickly become overloaded if new approaches are not developed to address this.”
Other security technologies also track IP addresses for various purposes, including filtering out sources of denial of service attacks, click fraud and search engine manipulation. Tracking a vastly expanded IP address space will make life much harder for network defenders, Paton warns.
More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/08/ipv6_spam_filtering_headache/
Intel hosted an event called “A Day in the Clouds” for members of the press, and El Reg sat in on briefings with Intel’s top brass in the cloud organization and did a tour of the labs behind its Cloud Builder program
This was the first time that Intel put some numbers on the cloud phenomenon and articulated its role in helping IT customers transform their brittle machinery and software into something a little more manageable and a lot more like the dream of virtualized, utility computing that has been in development since the issues with cheap, distributed computing became apparent in the wake of the dot-com bust.
Much more: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/07/intel_day_in_the_clouds/
Unless a US company is hell-bent on selling the very cheapest goods, manufacturing at home makes more sense than it has in a generation
Saudi King Abdullah to buy Facebook for $150 billion to end the revolt?
If a 14-year old boy coerces a 14-year old girl into making a sex video on a cellphone, then releases that video on the Internet, can he be charged as a child pornographer? A federal case in Kentucky may set key precedent
Are Tablets Ruining Watching TV Together?
The phone was one thing. Pulling it out in social settings is dicy, but at least you can slip it out and slip it back in. Tablets, on the other hand, cast a shadow over who you’re sitting next to. They have a presence in the room. You hold them with both hands. You can glance at a phone—it’s harder to glance at a tablet
http://gizmodo.com/#!5775732/are-tablets-ruining-watching-tv-together
Transcendent Man – chronicles the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist that presents his bold vision of the Singularity
a point in the near future when technology will be changing so rapidly, that we will have to enhance ourselves with artificial intelligence to keep up. Ray predicts this will be the dawning of a new civilization in which we will no longer be dependent on our physical bodies, we will be trillions of times more intelligent and there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. Human aging and illness will be reversed; world hunger and poverty will be solved and we will ultimately cure death.
http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/independent/transcendentman/
Dutch RABO bank to file criminal complaint having suffered cyber attack, Dutch National Cyber Security Center coming up and call to address problems caused by data encryption
Dutch media are reporting that last weekend, the RABO bank suffered from system failure rendering its online banking facilities inaccessible for several hours. Today it turns out that the cause had been a Denial of Service (DOS) attack. The bank will now go and file a criminal complaint with Dutch law enforcement authorities.
On the same day the Dutch Minister for Security and Justice Mr. Ivo Opstelten announces the birth of a National Cyber Security Center as well as the expansion of the Dutch Team High Tech Crime to remedy the cyber threat.
The Dutch Police Union (ACP) made public that legal encryption tools pose a big threat to enforcement activities both on a national and international level. It wants the developers of encryption software to cooperate with enforcement authorities and calls for international regulatory measures as well.
Dutch language news articles:
http://www.nu.nl/algemeen/2453108/rabobank-doet-aangifte-cyberaanval.html
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2452974/nationaal-centrum-cyberaanvallen.html
http://www.nu.nl/internet/2453115/gecodeerde-info-groot-probleem-in-opsporing.html
An influential private sector trademark defender is proposing to the World Intellectual Property Organization to undertake creation of an international “notice and takedown” system for alleged online trademark infringers
And he told Intellectual Property Watch that this will be followed in a few months by a separate proposal for a “notice-and-trackdown” article requiring internet service providers to divulge information about online counterfeiters so they can be gone after.
Obama in private confab with Jobs, Zuckerberg, Schmidt
The president and the business leaders discussed shared goal of promoting American innovation, and commitment to new investments in research and development, education and clean energy
More: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/17/obama_hosts_tech_titan_meeting/
Pollution may cause rapid evolutionary change in fish
Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State: Internet Rights and Wrongs: Choices & Challenges in a Networked World
Full speech: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/02/156619.htm
Highlights:
- What happened in Egypt and what happened in Iran, which this week is once again using violence against protestors seeking basic freedoms, was about a great deal more than the internet;
- There is a debate currently underway in some circles about whether the internet is a force for liberation or repression. But I think that debate is largely beside the point;
- Increasingly, we are turning to the internet to conduct important aspects of our lives. The internet has become the public space of the 21st century – the world’s town square, classroom, marketplace, coffeehouse, and nightclub. We all shape and are shaped by what happens there, all 2 billion of us and counting. And that presents a challenge;
- To maintain an internet that delivers the greatest possible benefits to the world, we need to have a serious conversation about the principles that will guide us, what rules exist and should not exist and why, what behaviors should be encouraged or discouraged and how;
- The goal is not to tell people how to use the internet any more than we ought to tell people how to use any public square, whether it’s Tahrir Square or Times Square. The freedoms to assemble and associate also apply in cyberspace. In our time, people are as likely to come together to pursue common interests online as in a church or a labor hall;
- Together, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and association online comprise what I’ve called the freedom to connect. The United States supports this freedom for people everywhere, and we have called on other nations to do the same. Because we want people to have the chance to exercise this freedom;
For the United States, the choice is clear. On the spectrum of internet freedom, we place ourselves on the side of openness. Now, we recognize that an open internet comes with challenges. It calls for ground rules to protect against wrongdoing and harm. And internet freedom raises tensions, like all freedoms do. But we believe the benefits far exceed the costs.
- The challenge is finding the proper measure: enough security to enable our freedoms, but not so much or so little as to endanger them. Finding this proper measure for the internet is critical because the qualities that make the internet a force for unprecedented progress – its openness, its leveling effect, its reach and speed – also enable wrongdoing on an unprecedented scale. Terrorists and extremist groups use the internet to recruit members, and plot and carry out attacks. Human traffickers use the internet to find and lure new victims into modern-day slavery. Child pornographers use the internet to exploit children. Hackers break into financial institutions, cell phone networks, and personal email accounts. So we need successful strategies for combating these threats and more without constricting the openness that is the internet’s greatest attribute;
- Likewise, we are leading the push to strengthen cyber security and online innovation, building capacity in developing countries, championing open and interoperable standards and enhancing international cooperation to respond to cyber threats;
That’s why I’ve created the Office of the Coordinator for Cyber Issues, to enhance our work on cyber security and other issues and facilitate cooperation across the State Department and with other government agencies. I’ve named Christopher Painter, formerly senior director for cyber security at the National Security Council and a leader in the field for 20 years, to head this new office.
- Fundamentally, the WikiLeaks incident began with an act of theft. Government documents were stolen, just the same as if they had been smuggled out in a briefcase. Some have suggested that this theft was justified because governments have a responsibility to conduct all of our work out in the open in the full view of our citizens. I respectfully disagree. The United States could neither provide for our citizens’ security nor promote the cause of human rights and democracy around the world if we had to make public every step of our efforts. Confidential communication gives our government the opportunity to do work that could not be done otherwise;
- The dramatic increase in internet users during the past 10 years has been remarkable to witness. But that was just the opening act. In the next 20 years, nearly 5 billion people will join the network. It is those users who will decide the future;
- Internet freedom is about defending the space in which all these things occur so that it remains not just for the students here today, but your successors and all who come after you. This is one of the grand challenges of our time. We are engaged in a vigorous effort against those who we have always stood against, who wish to stifle and repress, to come forward with their version of reality and to accept none other. We enlist your help on behalf of this struggle. It’s a struggle for human rights, it’s a struggle for human freedom, and it’s a struggle for human dignity.
Much more: http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/02/156619.htm
