Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler has written a very comprehensive book to describe conflicts between analog and digital data creators in society and how internet based technologies are changing society and commerce.

It’s a good read but hard to grasp due to a focus on economics. Don’t be fooled the by title if your looking at computer networks….he has written it into the binding that ties his arguments together.  It is truly worth the read.

Benkler shares how technology has merged the professional and the consumer into a ‘prosumer’ due to low cost and high performing computers and robust networks have made distribution of information cheap enough that community is now empowered to drive change.

Take a look at how the internet has evolved.  The Akami to YouTube migration showed how multimedia has found a free, reliable distribution center.  When you also migrate 1st generation complex, large scale websites to new blogs and content management systems under the open source business model Benkler states that data is now a “non-rival” product that has democratized the digital workflow of data from brick and mortar to community, peer-developed content solutions.

Benkler suggests modern computing drives new, strong and deep collaboration that can have a large impact on the global economy and society.  Benkler also suggests that as more consumers embrace technology collaboration, change to our culture is possible due to engines of free exchange (wikipedia, creative commons, open source and the blogosphere) could be more efficient (when shared) than current models that are restricted by copyright and patents because the ability to duplicate (or reproduce digital content) makes little or no impact on business.

Tags: The Wealth of Networks, Social Technologies, economy, society, Yochai Benkler, education, change, reading, trends

Only 13 percent of the professors surveyed said they used blogs in teaching; 12 percent had tried videoconferencing; and 13 percent gave interactive quizzes using “clickers,” or TV-remotelike devices that let students respond and get feedback instantaneously. The one technology that most teachers use regularly—course-management systems—focuses mostly on housekeeping tasks like handing out assignments or keeping track of student grades.

The survey, answered by 4,600 professors nationwide and did not ask about PowerPoint, which anecdotal evidence suggests is ubiquitous as a replacement for overhead and slide projectors.

Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium, held in San Jose, by the Sloan Consortium.

There seems to be a lesson for all those technology enthusiasts and “leaders” in k12 education:  Regardless of forcing faculty to utilize LMS, they are simply not using technology.

So is the technology investment paying off?  Universities have been investing millions into classrooms and lecture halls. With very tight budgets today I wonder if there is going to be a call for institutional reviews of technology spending.  Clearly the mantra of “build it and they will come” does not apply.

Outside of the mandatory use of LMS solutions (indicated above) faculty have clearly pushed back against technology while their students (paying customers) are eager to embrace the latest consumer electronic releases across the board.  This must be frustrating for IT, Academic affairs and the CFO’s office.

Missed reading this when it was originally released?  Consider the following accolades for his writing:

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
A Businessweek Best Business Book of the Year
A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
A Business Week Best Business Book of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book of the Year
A Booklist Editors’ Choice Best Book of the Year
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

Yet as of late I have been reading so much about Wall Street’s clusterf*ck that I missed his update Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America.

An overview to the version 2.0 release:

Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the world’s middle class through globalization have produced a planet that is “hot, flat, and crowded.”  In this Release 2.0 edition, he also shows how the very habits that led us to ravage the natural world led to the meltdown of the financial markets and the Great Recession.  The challenge of a sustainable way of life presents the United States with an opportunity not only to rebuild its economy, but to lead the world in radically innovating toward cleaner energy.  And it could inspire Americans to something we haven’t seen in a long time—nation-building—by summoning the intelligence, creativity, and concern for the common good that are our greatest national resources.

In vivid, entertaining chapters, Friedman makes it clear that the green revolution the world needs is like no revolution before. It will be the biggest innovation project in American history; it will be hard, not easy; and it will change everything from what you put into your car to what you see on your electric bill. This is a great challenge, Friedman explains, but also a great opportunity, and one that America cannot afford to miss. Not only is American leadership the key to the healing of the earth; it is also our best strategy for the renewal of America.

Tags: Tom Friedman, Hot, Flat and Crowded, environment, globalization, Green revolution, First Solar, Toledo, education, Germany, population, offshoring, outsourcing, India, coal, manufacturing, technology, reading, trends

Tab Candy features:
Organize tabs into groups that you can name and position on a desktop-like view
Search and Save tab groups to look at later
Have multiple profiles so that you can sign into the same site with different logins in two different tab groups
Share tabs or tab groups between users, computers and devices (Smartphone supported)

Annual costs to support a legacy back-end email server, software licensing and required related services (anti-spam, anti-virus, filtering and backup) must also run 24/7 while “people” costs include training and technical support.

Some legacy email solutions actually require a dedicated server to cannibalize a CPU — not virtualization friendly.  Think OpenText’s WorstClass FirstClass email server.

The green financial picture.
What’s an overlooked annual cost by IT and financial managers?  Electricity.  The cost to power all your school servers 24/7 can be rather shocking….sorry.

The first time I collaborated on a college’s annual budget, I was surprised energy costs for just three buildings on a small campus ran above $260,000/year.  Same probably applies for K12 district buildings.

Server costs and email requirements
If your school is running real industrial servers (1U or even 3U units) there are significant annual costs, regardless of rack, blade or tower servers.  Many schools on tight budgets re-purpose Pentium desktops to be “servers” along with those old, energy sucking CRT monitors.  Not a good idea.  And don’t be so moved by the marketing and PR efforts for “green” servers, they run all day and still cost a surprising amount over a three to five year lease.
…you do lease your school’s servers?

How to fight the power
So how much does your school’s servers cost to power year-round?  Gather total watts for EVERY computer in your server room which includes KVM/SAN/DNS/RTSP/CIPA filter and spam/virus systems along with all attached monitors and run the numbers.

Don’t overlook HVAC costs too.  Even small server rooms required large HVAC.  Is there a large server room at your school?   You should be looking at a rather BIG number. Hopefully your school has negotiated an acceptable rate from your regional electrical conglomerate.  For many small schools this is reasonably accurate:

Monday – Friday:
7:00am to 7:00pm 5 cents / kilowatt hour
7:00pm to 7:00am 3.5 cents / kilowatt hour
Weekends:
7:00am to 7:00pm 3.5 cents / kilowatt hour
7:00pm to 7:00am 3.5 cents / kilowatt hour

Remember servers run weekends, holiday breaks AND all summer long — even though K12 districts mostly sit empty.  Yes empty….lights are on but nobody’s home and your still burning your energy budget.

Your CFO will think its outrageous believe me, followed by a call to auto-shut down idle office and lab computers.   By the way, run the numbers for ALL computers at your school campus-wide:  computing labs along with Library, business offices and dedicated computing studios.

Re-coop costs
It helps if your IT staff embed energy-saving measures in their system configurations.  This means computers are configured to power off, dictated by your school’s traffic patterns of actual use.  Configuring monitors to “dim” is NOT energy savings (guys, the monitor still requires power in “dim” mode) so just power it off.  Believe me the time it takes a student to push the power-on button is worth the green effort.  Present the modified numbers by your CFO….it will become mandatory in the default configuration.

Can you believe lab computers are configured to NEVER sleep?  Yep – power consumption is burning money 24/7/365.  Stranger than fiction to watch a school’s budget burn up right in-front of your eyes.  Irresponsible and outdated attitudes are simply passed-on in the way of increased tuition or higher taxes for a K12 school district.

Obsolete Certification
Ironic that email administrators have been known to use established certifications as an excuse to continue running an expensive, legacy system.  Remember your school (tuition or taxpayer) is paying for certifications, some approaching $1,000 to re-enforce legacy email solutions.

I have watched the use of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) while addressing alternative email solutions with a college email administrator…a true “deer in the headlights” moment.  And of course the issue of being certified was part of the reaction.  It scares the hell out of them. Discussions about changing email become a threat to some or political firestorm for others.   In the end you need to convey that shifts in the computer marketplace continue to accelerate, and email is now apart of that discussion.

Conduct an energy audit.
After partnering with a regional energy conglomerate to implement a college’s first-ever energy audit, I learned much about implementing efficient measures directly impacting the organization’s IT carbon footprint while reducing annual energy costs.

Today’s students are more aware of their need to reduce carbon footprints while junior faculty are embracing green energy savings at home and at school so there is real momentum despite an IT team’s outdated approach to let everything run all day and all night.

At one operations meeting with College executives I learned the school was going to partner with the energy conglomerate for a financial gift.  I simply asked to consider negotiating a $0.15 shaving off our kilowatt/hour costs….the school did not recognize that avenue of thinking.  Remember that $260,000 annual energy bill.  One would hope a-quarter-of-a-million-dollars would change the way people think.

Google Apps for Education
By migrating from an internal email server (and associated services mentioned above) to Google Apps for Education (GAE) schools eliminate ALL server related AND energy costs.  And maybe, just maybe if your school is forward thinking you can reduce expensive Microsoft site licensing with GAE’s bundled suite.
Yesterday Google announced two more states have adopted GAE for 3,000 schools across Colorado and Iowa.  I see lots of financial and energy savings as well.

Its all about change and I know change is hard.  May I recommend Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard.  At the same time I believe sharing the spreadsheet energy cost saving should be enough for most decision makers.

Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, email server, Postini, technology budget, increased tuition, taxpayer, tipping point, carbon footprint, K12, trends

As budgets have been cut across the country for education, this is a smart move for many financially strapped school districts.  Does it pay for a District to force taxpayers to pay for expensive, legacy email programs like FirstClass and Novell when cloud based solutions with robust feature sets are being embraced by K12 and Colleges around the country.

Source article

Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, education, Postini, anti-virus, K12, trends

Google CloudCourse LMS

To no surprise CloudCourse is fully integrated with Google Calendar.  Google has also made CloudCourse customizable for schools by supporting service provider interfaces:

Sync services – Sync CloudCourse data with school’s internal systems
Room services – Schedule classes in school locations
User info services – Support for school profiles (employee title, picture, etc)

CloudCourse was built in Python and uses Django (web application framework) and the Closure Javascript library.
CloudCourse code site and wiki link

Tags: CloudCourse, open source, Learning Management System, LMS, education, python, django, trends

As many have shared on twitter — a lot of people with Google Wave accounts simply “don’t get it” and the new channel on YouTube will provide a great single repository for Wave fans to learn about their real-time collaboration solution.  Wave is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking.

As many have accomplished, Waves around the world have proved to be excellent communication opportunities for individuals.  If Google wants to reach out to small groups and large organizations, they must provide mass accounts to really kick the tires and integrate this promising tool into their infrastructure…..BTW it can help revolutionize a number of outdated ‘workflows’ that are in use today in non-profits, education and business.

Tags: Google Wave, beta software, Collaboration, real-time, communication, test audience, limited preview, trends

From Google:

A better document editor
We’ve brought the responsive, real-time editing experience you’ve come to expect from our spreadsheets over to documents, which means you can now see character-by-character changes as other collaborators make edits. We also added another popular feature from spreadsheets: sidebar chat, so you can discuss documents as you work on them with colleagues.

The new technical foundation also helped us improve document formatting, which means better import/export fidelity, a revamped comment system, real margins and tab stops, and improved image layout within documents. These improvements have been highly requested, but previously impossible to create with the older documents editor on older browsers.

A faster spreadsheet editor
With the new spreadsheets editor, you’ll see significant speed and performance improvements — spreadsheets load faster, are more responsive and scroll more seamlessly. We’ve also added a host of often requested features, like a formula bar for cell editing, auto-complete, drag and drop columns, and simpler navigation between sheets. And as always, real-time collaboration in spreadsheets is easy with sidebar chat and the ability to see which cell each person is editing.

A new collaborative drawing editor
In the year since we launched the Insert drawing tool, we’ve received many requests for the ability to collaborate on drawings and make them accessible directly from the docs list. The new standalone drawings editor lets you collaborate in real time on flow charts, designs, diagrams and other fun or business graphics. Copy these drawings into documents, spreadsheets and presentations using the web clipboard, or share and publish drawings just like other Google Docs.

Tags: Google Docs, performance improvements, Network, trends,

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tags: OLPC, Sugar Labs, laptop per child, XO, open source, globalization, trends

Tags: Blaise Aguera y Arcas, Seadragon, Photosynth, design, TED, Virtual Reality, imaging, trends

Tags: Visualization, information, Chart Wars, politics, trends

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tags: Web Toolkit, Google, Developers, datasets, innovation, technology, trends

The biggest elephant in his book is how America’s educational system needs a much required re-boot in order to compete against tomorrow’s global students who have access to free tools including Linux.  Or new technology like water pumps in Africa.  He references Tom Friedman‘s The World is Flat: a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

Zakaria was able to simply convey that America remains the top country for innovation, technology and Intellectual Property but India and China are catching up by introducing more of their citizens to the global economy.  India is first only in population growth while the level of poverty slowly dropped.

While true to some extent the reader may be surprised to see the detail about how splintered Al-Qaeda has become.  In Iraq for example the aim of this terrorist group has moved from targeting American and Israel to fighting other Muslim warlords and religious groups for control of Al-Qaeda’s future.

It should be noted Zakaria also addresses the issues of global climante and energy.  But to again point to Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America not a lot of new ideas or information.

Overall Zakaria’s book is a gentle wake up call for America and is much smoother on the American reader than Mark Steyn’s America Alone.  The war in Iraq and Afghanistan while critical, reveals Al-Qaeda‘s struggle since 9/11 to deliver any significant violence on American soil.  Why?  Zakaria’s position is that Bin Laden has been so tightly curtailed, his organization still under a microscope has evolved into a communications company and is no longer a true terrorist organization.

Tags: Fareed Zakaria, Globalization, education, China, India, , energy, population, poverty, technology, Tom Friedman, terrorist, trends

Tags: OLPC, XO-2, laptop, XO, Negroponte, globalization, trends

Google has been helping K12 Schools and Colleges save money by giving free access to their powerful tools in an enterprise setting.  Google began offering Gmail and have continued to add more tools to their suite specifically tuned for schools.  Known as Google Apps for Education (GAE) this collection provides an excellent solution for schools just as most technology budgets are shrinking…or should I say…being slashed to the bone.

To no surprise Gmail has been a hit with schools.  In 2006 Arizona State University was one of the first colleges to migrate to Gmail.  They moved 65,000 student email accounts saving over $400,000 in ANNUAL related email costs.  Since then more higher education institutions including Northwestern University (case study) and Notre Dame (moved 15,000 students and 150,000 alumni and saved $1.5 Million) have migrated to Gmail.

For Students, Faculty and Administrative staff, GAE has grown to include 7GB of individual email storage, integration with GoogleCalendar, GoogleDocs (word processing, spreadsheets and presentations) and GoogleSites (websites and wikis) for web publishing.  Google has even added 10GB of storage to their Google Video offering.  These tools provide a tremendous savings for schools who can retire in-house or expensive outsourced systems.

From Good To Great:
A necessary email-related tool schools need is anti-spam and anti-virus protection.  And Google has recently responded with an AWESOME offer for K12 Schools that’s too good to pass up:

Until July 2010 K12 Districts can migrate to Google Apps for Education AND receive FREE anti-spam/anti virus-protection via Postini

Postini is a popular (Google owned) industrial strength anti-spam & anti-virus solution.  And Google is even offering deep discounts on email archiving, malware protection and web filtering for K12 Districts as part of Postini.

In today’s economy hundreds of under-funded K12 school districts are moving to Gmail as a permanent replacement for those expensive, legacy solutions from companies like Novell and WorstClass FirstClass.  Google provides free GAE infrastructure tools for School IT Administrators and Google’s Sync is available to K12 IT Administrators to links contacts and calendars for popular mobile devices including Blackberry, iPhone and Android smartphones.

Still not convinced?  Take a moment and learn about ASU’s Gmail conversion:

Click here to view the embedded video.

How much does email cost your school?  Its expensive and ultimately costs are passed to taxpayers or student tuition.  By the way, what sliding scale fee does your school annually pay for a campus-wide Microsoft Office license?  GAE kills two birds with one stone as Google Docs is a free replacement for Office.

Act Now – Deploy later. Google’s offer ends July 2010

Related: Top Ten Reasons Schools should move to Google Apps.

Tags: Google, Google Apps for Education, education, Postini, anti-virus, K12, trends

However if you have been working with blogs and wikis for more than five years this book is a bit too elementary but a great quick read nevertheless.

The Groundswell is the powerful movement of our networked society. Basically the book breaks the “groundswell” into gaining insights from what social networks say about your company, your products and the people representing your company.

Blogs help talk to your communities, and buzz helps energize the groundswell and the new ability to utilize “customers” as collaborative team members.
In the end its about person to person relationships.

Groundswell’s blog

Tags: Groundswell, Social Technologies, economy, networking, buzz, education, values, reading, trends

And YES you can read his book for free online at Scribd and at Google Books.  You can also download a full unabridged 6 hour audiobook for free — or purchase a 3 hour abridged copy.  Get it?

If you have not been paying close attention to the Free Economy, there is a lot you can learn from this book.  Anderson traces the history of “free” products (Gillette razor blades in 1895 and even Jello) and services and intelligently outlines how “free” is driving sales in our culture today.  Even in our current economic recession.

He introduces the idea by recalling the announcement from Monty Python, who’s pirated movies were already on YouTube.  They decided to establish their own YouTube channel, place higher quality clips online with links to their DVD products….and placed a hilarious insult letter to all their fans.

Even though they were placing movies online for free, fans purchased their DVDs at Amazon, driving them to the #2 sales rank with an increased sales volume of 23,000%.  That’s no typo: a 23,000% sales jump!  Clearly free works.

Anderson has done great research to help explain (he calls them “sidebars” in the book) to help you see where you have already run across “free” in your daily life including radical ideas including air travel, cars, silverware, textbooks and even a university education.

If you have a child gifted in school or passionate about learning a specific subject you can tap the world’s best professors online via MIT’s OpenCourseWare or download audio and video lectures online via iTunesU or at a school’s website like Stanford.

I think this book can even “wake you up” to really see how innovative marketing is changing the world.  Would you ever think a child’s online game (Club Penguin) that is free to play can generate associated revenue equal to the largest worldwide subscription revenue of the Wall Street Journal?  Think again.

Want to learn how?  Read his book….its free!

Tags: Chris Anderson, Free: The future of a Radical Price, marketing, copyright, internet, economy, innovation, ideas, business, radical, reading, trends

BTW: The cover is not an actual photo rather a Photoshop’d image. However the image clearly represents his message.  The book is about Generativity impacting the internet.  Ultimately his argument is to place generativity at the core of all open technologies that tap into the internet.

Zittrain begins Part I in the book with a bit of historical reflection: The Battle of the Boxes, Battle of the Networks and CyberSecurity.  He followed on the impact of legal lessons learned from Wikipedia.  There are plenty of examples how open, generativity systems make the internet better.  Here are a couple of examples Zittrain addressed that do not:

Law enforcement agencies have used network devices to manually turn on OnStar (the in-vehicle security, communications, and diagnostics system from GM) to record and monitor conversations of unknowing passengers.  OnStar is installed in over 50 models of GM cars alone.

The FBI requested from a judge the ability to turn on the microphone of a unsuspecting cell phone owner allowing law enforcement to tap, track and record conversations.

Think about that for a moment. Ever take a picture with your digital camera or cell phone?  Millions of people do this everyday and upload content to photo-sharing websites like Flickr.  Can you imagine taking a series of photographs — only to later realize the camera (via remote commands) copied all your photos without your knowledge.  Zittrain addresses how your personal content can be affected by a judge in Texas while you live … say in Ohio.  Don’t believe it? Read Chapter 5: Tethered Appliances, Software as Service and Perfect Enforcement” to see how a judge in Marshall Texas did just that — regarding a copyright case involving TiVo.

Zittrain accurately addresses how generativity (on the internet) will impact how we engage data — regardless if the task is email, video streaming, blogging or accessing robots over a wireless network via smartphone.   He uses the example of two products from Apple that were developed in opposite directions exactly 30 years apart:  The Apple II and the iPhone but missed out on Amazon’s Kindle.  The Apple II fit the idea of generativity perfectly.  It was an “open” desktop computer and the world began to tinker, develop, push and ultimately secure the product’s success.

Zittrain compares this approach to the 1st generation iPhone.  Zittrain recently blogged about a bizarre copyright conflict between an iPhone application that clearly reinforces his position: Apple has the ability to control application distribution.  This means you can purchase an application at Apple’s iTunes store, download it and use it on your iPhone but Apple can remotely kill that program at any given point in the future.

To be fair: At the time of his writing the 1st generation iPhone was selling for $500.  Today we have the iPhone 3GS, OS 3.0, The App Store and Apple’s road-map for iPhone developers. The most change has been the highly successful App Store on iTunes with over a billion apps downloaded.
Yes – BILLION.  Profit gets in the way too.

To see another example of Zittrain’s idea substitute TiVo or Amazon’s Kindle and you’ll get his message. Remember TiVo tipped its hand revealing it tracks what users watch? That came as a bit of a surprise to many  unaware their viewing habits were tracked.

Even though Amazon recently updated their Kindle ebook reader to support users adding PDF files, the Kindle’s generativity score (this might be a new blog all by itself) would be very low due to its lack of open standards.  Amazon has run into issues due to remotely crippling installed ebooks due to copyright and DRM.

There is also a copyright issue with the new Kindles.  The new model has the ability to read ebooks aloud.  Publishing companies began suing Amazon over this “feature” on the bigger Kindles.  Publishers want to sell you an Audiobook version of the eBook loaded on your Kindle.  So in the end you pay twice for the same digital product!  Publishers argue eBooks legally cannot be read out loud.  Amazing.  For all the technology advances, profit still drives old school publishing companies to sue Amazon.

I found his conclusion powerful.  He shares the impact of Generativity on the OLPC project.  I am a fan of the One Laptop Per Child project.  As he suggests Generativity is really at the core of this product.  It has changed the world and can be viewed (in a limited way) as a path for future internet generativity.

Tags: Jonathan Zittrain, Future of the Internet, Generativity, copyright, internet, Network, Apple II, iphone, TiVo, onstar, amazon, OLPC, reading, trends

adobe presentations

At first glance you may ask is this Adobe’s PowerPoint Killer?  Actually the real competition is with SlideRocket, a strong online presentation tool that has been online for a couple of years and gathering high praise. Both Keynote and SlideRocket take a strong visual approach to authoring slide presentations.

Look at Photoshop.com to see how powerful visual tools can be migrated from the desktop to the internet.  In the end desktop competitors PowerPoint and Keynote along with online competitor SlideRocket are much more robust presentation tools.

Throw in Google’s presentation tool and Adobe’s product looks childish by comparison.  This is “Adobe” we are talking about: Photoshop, Illustrator and now Flash.  FYI: This tool is a flash-based online technology.  Adobe offers only eleven designs that look, well…by Adobe’s standards rather boring:

Adobe master themes

Slide masters click for larger image

When you switch between themes you discover the number of  layouts to be limited to 6 or 8 per theme.  Not very flexible. At the same time there is no intuitive interface for simply linking content (photos or example) from Flickr.  Limiting indeed and really not thinking about the impact of social media.  Adobe bills this as “create stunning presentations with others online” but nothing could be further from the truth.

FWIW: Keynote provides 44 default themes, some include 20 different slide layouts.  With a wide audience the more visual options the better.  Keynote even supports HD themes.  Microsoft offers PowerPoint templates.  3rd Party slide vendors really offer PowerPoint and Keynote “power presenters” real, visually rich choices.  For example Keynotepro offers a 72 slide master theme.

One of the biggest problems for slideware websites including SlideShare is analytics.  Whether you like it or not, today we are all competing on analytics.  Sliderocket provides visitor traffic analytics for each presentation.  Not only is this lacking with Adobe Presentation its a bigger issue with branding any organization’s communication over the internet.  Maybe the most important issue overall.  If you have no way of knowing if anyone has watched your presentation … what is the point?

So what is best part?  With the shortcomings listed above the best part is the price.  Free.
But remember you get what you pay for.

The worst part is actually your internet connection.  Adobe’s sees this is a collaboration tool for building presentations with others.  When your internet connection is slow your workflow experience will be just as slow. Over cable (roadrunner download speed >6MB/s) my presentation playback was stalling.  I can only imagine its worse over DSL or a saturated connection at any business or school.  Try editing slides with co-workers in real-time over slow bandwidth? No Thanks.

You may want to consider a bandwidth upgrade as part of this product’s requirements.

Tags: adobe, network, Presentation, Slideware, PowerPoint, Keynote, Sliderocket, education, technology, trends

“When the US Department of Defense is the target of no fewer than 128 information infrastructure attacks per minute from China, and we discover that while DoD is almost universally using off-the-shelf Microsoft Windows systems while China is engaged in working toward 100% military deployment of security hardened FreeBSD, it becomes clear that there’s definitely something wrong with US information security policy.”

Source: TechRepublic

The amount of cyber attacks from foreign countries is pretty amazing.  K12 School Districts are not amune from foreign attacks either.

Tags: China, network, The Great Firewall of China, globalization, national security, Microsoft Windows, Censorship, education, technology, trends

who controls the internet

On the surface you may believe — even in 2009 that you can still say anything, do anything or hack any computer around the globe without impunity because you can hide inside the internet.

Goldsmith and Wu challenge Tom Friedman’s (The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century) position that globalization is opening up communication in countries that have long suppressed their citizen’s ability to speak freely.

China for example. Or think about the European Union.  Is the EU able to dictate how Microsoft releases software?  Think again.  When Microsoft published it’s passport technology it was rejected by the EU.  Rather than pay a fine Microsoft added the tougher security standards dictated by the EU for all customers worldwide.  Those standards are even tougher than those used in America.

Can France tell Yahoo or eBay what products to sell?  They can and they already do.  This book is written from a legal standpoint since both teach at the Law Schools of Harvard and Columbia respectively. Is it strange to see government control over the internet?  Would this be different if today was September 10 2001?  Goldsmith and Wu share their insight to the way Law helps and hinders the internet.  From simply selling memorabilia to cybercrime you learn gaping holes exist even today to prosecute offenders and criminals.

The “I Love You” virus that cost US companies millions of dollars originated in The Philippines, but since there is no law against this type of crime in the The Philippines the US was unable to arrest the known hacker.  Similar rules apply in Russia. When the FBI arrested a hacker who extorted millions from US companies, Russia did not acknowledge this type of crime and did not agree to extradite, so the FBI was forced to release the criminal.

Goldsmith and Wu share the legal case between Yahoo and the country of France that forced Yahoo’s online store to pull Nazi related memorabilia even though Yahoo is an American based company.  But Yahoo’s remote offices in France proved to the key error Jerry Yang overlooked.  Yahoo has stumbled a lot lately.

Control over the internet extends to US K12 School Districts who filter web content to protect minors from material that is deemed to be offensive, sexual or drug related.  But many in America may find that the country of Australia has been trying to impose the same type of filtering for the whole country.

As the internet has grown in popularity and extending access to schools, banks, companies and financial firms the need to protect assets against cybercrime has also grown.  To no surprise the US and foreign countries have begun to establish laws to protect citizens and business.

Finally Goldsmith and Wu show how companies eager to enter China’s vast market have been answering to the communist party vs. individual freedoms.  Yahoo provided the strongest example when they give Chinese authorities the identity of a blogger who wrote “controversial” posts about the Chinese government and leadership.

Who Controls the Internet is a valuable read to understand that governments can control access and at the same time acknowledge some laws are not enough when hunting cyber crime.

who controls the internet

I have been impressed with the book, including a new preface to the paperback release.  But guys, seriously….why did you ditch the original hardcover visual? The typography on the updated paperback is terrible in comparison. Looks like someone forgot to ftp the master cover art to the book publisher.

Goldsmith and Wu also trace the history of DNS and ICANN regarding the recent discussions about moving control of the internet to the UN or to other countries, both friend and foe.  There is a lot to be considered if giving up control of a democratic tool to the Chinese or any non-democratic country including Russia.

There are plenty of examples of how the net began as a US defense department project and has revolutionized the world.  But they also do not acknowledge any issue with ICANN and the role of spam.  Since many spam servers sit outside the US there is little the government can do to stop this threat.  Ditto for identity theft.

Tags: internet, Legal, China, Cisco, Tom Friedman, filtering, European Union, Microsoft, trends,

The most surprising session was “HD video over IP for Distance Learning” because the original presenter did not show up….so I decided to try an Unconference session that ran two hours long.  Lots of great learning about how K12 Districts around the Midwest want to bring distance learning and HD video into the classroom.