fcc-westky.org

Eighteen months after a denial-of-service attack, the Estonian Ministry of Defense has posted a detailed report (PDF) on the attacks. While focusing on specific steps the nation needs to take to prevent another attack, the report contains global recommendations as well.

In May 2007, the Baltic nation experienced a series of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks as a result of its government’s decision to relocate a statue honoring an unknown Russian person killed during World War II. At Black Hat in 2007, security expert Gadi Evron said the attacks were not directed by the Russian Federation, or any government entity; he suggested it was the work of a “flash mob” of individuals from all over the world. In January, a native Russian in Estonia was convicted for his involvement in the event.

The report calls for Estonia to apply a graduated system of security measures, develop high awareness of information security to the highest standard, develop appropriate regulatory and legal framework of information systems, and promote international cooperation toward achieving global cybersecurity.

On the latter topic, Estonia will seek global condemnation of cyberattacks given the impact on individuals’ livelihoods. In Estonia, a nation that is well-wired per capita, the DoS attacks shut down local ISPs and prevented people from buying food, getting gas, or completing bank transactions for several days.

The report concludes that Estonia should seek the cooperation of all nations in strengthening local cybersecurity law enforcement by presenting its expertise and experience at global security conferences.

(Credit:
T-Mobile)

Without the touchscreen keypad, people have to slide out the QWERTY keypad to send text messages, IMs, and e-mail.

Google has added “soft keyboards” to its road map of future software releases. The new software hook is expected to be available for phone manufacturers as part of the source code in the first three months of 2009.

Ever since Apple’s
iPhone hit the market, some people have loved using a virtual keypad. Others have hated it.

While there are many features to love about the G1, which is the first Android phone to hit the market, there are several items missing. A virtual keypad is one of them.

Owners of Google’s new G1 Android phones could soon have a choice to use either the existing slide-out QWERTY keyboard or a virtual keyboard like the iPhone’s.

Let’s start with why we don’t need the Noncommercial license. One justification for having a Noncommercial is that you don’t want your photos used in some big advertising campaign or in a company’s annual report without compensation. However, in fact, photographs licensed under Creative Commons licenses of any sort aren’t a good fit for commercial photography anyway.

But, you cry, a magazine like The Economist shouldn’t be able to use a Noncommercial image either–even for editorial purposes. 

I could also make a variety of arguments against having separate licenses that allow or prohibit changes to an artistic work.

If so, I hope you won’t be too upset at me for burying my real lede. Because if the above is a reasonable Noncommercial CC license–and I think it is–then we don’t need it. And that’s actually a good thing because if you take a good look at the Creative Commons license summary page, it’s clearly something that only a license geek could love and is far too complex in its Chinese menu approach to be widely understood and accepted.

At the risk of oversimplifying, open-source software licenses are mostly concerned with the degree to which derivative works have to be given to the commons. With rare and narrow exceptions, they don’t get into who is using the software or the manner in which the code can be changed or extended. That may seem perfectly normal, but that’s only because we’re so used to it. One can easily imagine an open-source license that says some piece of software can only be used and modified in an academic setting. That such licenses are rare to nonexistent is a large part of why open-source software has become so commonplace.

With respect to photography specifically, "Commercial" and "Noncommercial" are particularly confusing terms because commercial already has a fairly specific meaning in the context of photography. It mostly applies to photographs used for advertising and marketing purposes–as opposed to editorial or artistic uses. It’s an important distinction within photography because commercial photographs typically require things like model releases from subjects whereas other types of photographs do not.

That’s not an irrational position but I’d argue that if Noncommercial is defined to read "not associated with making money," you’re effectively prohibiting the vast bulk of uses that aren’t already covered under Fair Use (use in academic environment), are trivial (I make a print to hang on my wall at home), or both. Sure, you can have such a license, but why bother? Some personal blogs and MySpace pages might gain access to some photos under such a license but it’s a pretty small slice of the possible uses. If you truly don’t want anyone to (legally) profit from your photographs however indirectly, there’s a simple option: Don’t release them under Creative Commons.

As I first discussed in a post back in November, the Noncommercial condition in some Creative Commons licenses needs to be clarified. The problem is that noncommercial, in the sense of not associated with making money, is such a vague term in an online world where Google AdSense and other forms of advertising are ubiquitous and so many Web sites and blogs represent some ambiguous intersection of the personal and professional. The Creative Commons organization apparently recognizes that there are issues. On their site, they state that: "In early 2008 we will be re-engaging that discussion and will be undertaking a serious study of the NonCommercial term which will result in changes to our licenses and/or explanations around them."

No one is forcing anyone to put their work into the public commons. But, once you do, you need to accept that you no longer can wholly control how it is used. The open-source software world understands this to its benefit. Now, open-content needs to do the same. The current regime is far too complex to implement and communicate.

One problem is that they haven’t cleared model and property rights as Virgin Mobile Australia discovered. The attribution requirement would be problematic for many other types of uses. (I can’t imagine the typical marketing presentation that I see consistently incorporating appropriate bylines as it passes through dozens of hands and revisions.) Dan Heller discusses even more serious problems in this post. I’m not sure I buy into everything Dan writes, but he raises a lot of good issues that, while not limited to commercial photography, are probably most pertinent there.

By contrast, Creative Commons licensing offers up a complicated set of options that seem calculated to encourage people to contribute works to the commons while not pushing their envelope to allow any uses with which they’re uncomfortable. While an understandable approach, it creates a system that’s far too complicated and doesn’t, in my opinion, have any real benefit beyond a simple license that requires attribution and which requires downstream derivatives to maintain the same license.

Thus, it seems to me that a Creative Commons definition that focused more on the type of use rather than the type of user could help to clarify things. A Noncommercial license could, for example, prohibit uses that relate to marketing, advertising, and other such uses. It might also prohibit the direct resale of the photo (as, for example, stock sites do).

As readers of this blog know, two of my interests are photography and open source, so I’m naturally particularly interested in the way the two intersect with each other. As a result, I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading and thinking about the Creative Commons license in the context of photos and, more broadly, how photos are best protected and shared in an online world. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but I wanted to share some threads that I’ve been researching and pondering.

Have I convinced you that the above would be a reasonable approach to a Noncommercial Creative Commons license?

As for reselling photos licensed under Creative Commons? That seems far better controlled by limiting access to original high-resolution images than it does license terms.

commentary

I can’t say that the guidelines in process really clear things up a lot. They seem to pay a lot of attention to US-centric technical distinctions related to what constitutes a nonprofit organization (IRS 501(c)(3)). Many very large and well-funded organizations, such as the National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club, are non-profits. On the other hand, the draft guidelines seem to suggest that some money-making uses are OK so long as it’s just an "individual."

“We’re between our high and low guidance,” Microsoft chief accounting officer Frank Brod told CNET News. He pointed to particularly strong results in the Windows business, where sales were up 15 percent from a year earlier, ahead of Microsoft’s forecast of 7 percent to 11 percent growth. Gains in piracy, particularly in China, helped that. He also noted that Microsoft has now sold 180 million licenses of
Windows Vista.

Brod said that Microsoft’s bookings pipeline remained strong, although he said Microsoft has seen an expansion of its sales cycle–the amount of time it takes to close deals–as companies spend longer weighing purchases.

Brod said that IT spending is stronger in emerging markets than in mature ones, but added Microsoft has “not seen a whole lot of pull back in our customer bases.”

The earnings report comes amid continued attention over whether Microsoft will choose to seal a deal in the online advertising arena. In addition to its seemingly endless on-again, off-again moves with Yahoo, Microsoft reportedly met Wednesday with Time Warner to talk about its AOL unit.

Sales of Windows were strong last quarter, but weaker than expected results from online advertising and the Office units led Microsoft earnings to come in a penny per share below analysts estimates. Microsoft also issued an outlook for the current quarter that fell short of what some analysts were projecting.

Microsoft shares dipped in after-hours trading, changing hands recently at $26.09, down $1.43, or more than 5 percent, according to Google Finance.

“We’re seeing the sales process takes a little longer than it has in the past,” Brod said. “A lot more debate goes on.”

For the current quarter, Microsoft said it expects per share earnings of 47 cents or 48 cents, on revenue of $14.7 billion to $14.9 billion. Analysts were targeting $15.0 billion in revenue and per-share earnings of 49 cents, according to First Call. The company also lowered its forecast for full-year earnings by 1 penny per share, with its new forecast calling for earnings of $2.12 to $2.18 per share.

“Embedded in our guidance for next year is a significant investment in the marketing program around Windows Vista.

Brod noted that the company does plan to continue investing in its online business as well as boosting the amount of money it spends marketing Windows.

For the three months ended June 30, Microsoft said it earned $4.3 billion, or 36 cents per share, on revenue of $15.84 billion for the fiscal fourth quarter ended June 30. That was within the range Microsoft forecast in April, although revenue was slightly higher than the $15.7 billion First Call estimate and per-share earnings were a penny lower than First Call projections.

“Our online services was off slightly from what our expectations as well as our business division was down slightly,” Brod said.

2. Webhost + E-mail (IMAP) at Rackspace
–We doubled in size and moved to the managed mail servers. Unfortunately there was no calendaring

Reliable delivery of mail (dare to dream)
Reliable delivery of mail on mobile devices (Blackberry and
iPhone)
Shared calendaring with administrator abilities (i.e. admin access)
Backup and recovery
Reliable SPAM prevention
Sync across multiple computers and devices

1. Webhost + E-mail (IMAP) at Dreamhost
–We were only about 15 people at this point and it was manageable

4. E-mail back to Rackspace

There are only a few systems that I know of that do this effectively (MS Exchange, Zimbra, Gmail) and the first two don’t do all of the above without third-party apps–specifically the mobile piece.

6. Google Apps Premier (Round 2)
–Besides hitting all of my list above, the SF.com integration is the key piece for us.

3. E-mail move to Gmail (Mission aborted due to lack of IMAP)
–We learned the hard way that Gmail Premier wasn’t ready for prime time one sad day when we realized that you couldn’t POP or get your mail via IMAP

Before I became a marketing wonk I was a knowledgeable technologist, which is probably why I’ve never once enjoyed any e-mail system that I have used or implemented. Over the last 15 years, I have tried pretty much everything, from Pine to Zimbra, to MS Exchange to Lotus Notes and several different IMAP and POP options. Every time it’s the same thing–the system works within reason but is never great. And there is always something that bites you in the rear.

As of this past Friday we started a beta with a few users maintaining both the Zimbra and Gmail. So far, the Gmail is good. In fact, its Gmail, just with our domain. The main trick is that it’s integrated with SF.com and so we now have records of sent mail tracked which enables collaboration on accounts. More on this in a separate post.

I first started outsourcing e-mail to managed providers in 2003 when I worked for a CEO who demanded MS Exchange and we only had Linux boxes. It was never great and it was too expensive to boot. But the offerings have gotten much better and at this point I can’t see a small- or medium-sized business running its own mail server. It’s just not necessary.

At my company we’ve changed mail systems no fewer than five times in less than two years. Lest you think we’re just crazed about IT let me outline the story:

Here are my fundamental hopes for e-mail:

5. E-mail move to Zimbra at Contegix
–We moved to Zimbra about nine months ago and we’ve had some mixed results. Zimbra running on RHEL have both had 100 percent uptime. However, as of the last month we’ve run into multiple instances of messages getting lost as well as entire e-mail boxes getting wiped. This might be due to the new release but no one can figure it out (though the Zimbra team has provided heroic efforts)

Have consumer interests changed or is Google just a search engine and, thus, a place where the inherent task of the service is to move people along? According to one Google representative, the counterculture was bred out of the company’s drive to get people out of the way on search.

And while it’s plain to see Google (and, obviously, other search engines) employing this “push” mentality to search, it may not be so easy to see on its other services. For example, I’m not too sure how that push mentality relates to Gmail at face value. But when you consider the fact that you can set up a Gmail account and use it on any other service, it quickly bears fruit. What about Picasa? Sure, you keep coming back to use the service, but it’s for a reason–you want a better-looking picture and get out of there as quickly as possible.

The company does that with its search, does it with Gmail, does it with Reader, does it with Picasa, does it with Docs, and the list goes on. In fact, Google is probably the largest online firm in the world that does as much as it can to get you off its pages. Doesn’t that seem at all counterintuitive?

But perhaps most fascinating is the inherent risk that piggybacks on the counterculture mentality Google is so quick to mention. After all, if just about every Web site on the Net says users should be kept on those pages for fear of losing them to something better, what does it say about Google when it wants users to go out and find something?

Why is that? Why has Google always been a company that has single-handedly taken the tried and true mentality of Web site owners for years and turned it upside down. On top of that, why has the company been able to succeed if conventional wisdom suggests that should never happen?

But if nothing else, Google has shown that trust can go a long way and it shouldn’t be abandoned because the Old Guard subscribed to a faulty belief that users need to be kept on a site for as long as possible. Everything on the Internet is a means to an end and never the end itself. Every single person reads editorial content, searches Google, modifies pictures, and listens to music for a reason. And to think that a particular site is that reason is both misguided and dumb.

And it’s this idea of speed and the length of time you can get in and get out that makes this counterculture so interesting. Although certain services attempt to do the same thing as Google, the speed with which you can find or do exactly what you want and be on to the next thing is easily what sets Sergey and Larry’s company apart.

Maybe because the old idea of keeping people on the site isn’t necessarily the best way to go. Perhaps users want to use a service that acts as a means to an end instead of a vehicle of infinite knowledge. Maybe users are sick and tired of sticky services and want nothing more than to bounce around the Web in search of the very best content no matter where it is.

Google is on to something with its counterculture and should be followed by more companies than just search engines. The Internet has changed and no site is safe from the perils of stickiness.

In the world of online services and editorial content, a term known as “stickiness” becomes the rallying cry of Webmasters and marketers alike. In essence, these people are fearful that if they lose visitors on the site, they’ll never get them back. But for some reason, Google doesn’t feel that way. In fact, it’s more than happy to send you out in the wild.

But if nothing else, this counterculture speaks to something that many in this business simply don’t want to mention–readers and Web surfers simply aren’t trusted and need to be lured into more and more pages so they will stay at the site. Simply put, the average Internet user isn’t trusted and never has been. And yet, when they finally are trusted, good things happen to the company who trusts them.

In essence, this is a company that has the guts to let you do what you want and hope that you will come back because the service is much better than anything else available.

“It makes it much cleaner,” Hall said.

In a follow-up interview on Monday, Windows Live general manager Brian Hall said Microsoft made the decision to remove the tools from Windows for several reasons, including a desire to issue new operating system releases more quickly than it has in the past. The move also removes the confusion of offering and supporting two different programs that perform essentially similar functions.

Antitrust rules make it hard for Microsoft to tie operating system features to specific services.

The software maker included Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Mail, and Windows Movie Maker as part of Vista, but later chose to offer separate downloadable Windows Live programs that essentially replaced those components with versions that could connect to online services from Microsoft and others.

Microsoft last week rolled out the latest “Wave 3″ releases of its Windows Live programs, adding Windows Live Movie Maker to the mix of programs, which includes Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Mail as well as blogging tool Windows Live Writer and instant messaging program Windows Live Messenger. While Windows XP and earlier releases had an instant messaging program built in, Microsoft took out that feature in Windows Vista.

“We can do things with specific partners to enable really great experiences that might be hard in Windows,” Hall said.

Hall said it was too soon to say if the “Wave 4″ release would precede Windows 7 or be coincident to it. Microsoft has said it will have Windows 7 on the market by January 2010, while CEO Steve Ballmer has said he is pushing for a release next year.

It remains to be seen just how Microsoft will distribute the Windows Live programs in conjunction with Windows 7-based PCs. Presumably the company could strike deals with computer makers or retailers to include the software, or links to download it.

Microsoft has decided that
Windows 7 won’t include built-in programs for e-mail, photo editing, and movie making, as was done with Windows Vista, CNET News.com has learned.

Lastly, he said, making the Windows Live tools completely separate from the operating system paves the way for Microsoft to work selectively with specific partners.

“We’ll do Wave 3 and then we’ll figure it out,” Hall said.

Click here for more news on Windows 7.

Microsoft told CNET News late Monday that it has decided to remove those features entirely from Windows 7 and instead offer only the service-connected Windows Live versions as optional free downloads. Earlier on Monday, Microsoft had declined to say how it was handling things.

At the beginning of the article, Strom says that “for a few hundred dollars a year you can buy inexpensive protection.” Hopefully, readers weren’t scared off by the price. Many off-site storage companies will hold backup copies of your files for much less money. Personally, I started out paying $10 a year for 1 gigabyte of off-site storage. Now, I pay $20 a year for 2 gigabytes.

The sentence in the article that most prompted this posting was this:

Strom warns that “in some cases, the first backup will take hours, if not days.” If it takes you days to make a backup, take it as a hint you’re barking up the wrong tree. Complete backups, those that include the operating system and applications, are best done with a disk imaging program to an external hard disk or DVDs. Fedex is what I suggest for any complete backups you might want to store off-site.

In choosing an off-site storage company, software that automates the backup process may sound like a good thing, but there is a downside–automation can go too far. Last year, Business 2.0 magazine almost didn’t publish an issue because they lost all their files. Their automated backups were a bit too automated; the backups hadn’t been running and no one noticed.

Finally, anyone considering off-site backups for the first time should read Ed Foster’s article, “Backup Service EULAs Warrant a Closer Look,” from last February in which he discusses the End User License Agreement from Mozy, Iron Mountain, Carbonite, Xdrive, and SOSonlinebackup. Even expecting the worst, it’s shocking.

See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.

“It’s a good idea to try out a service to see how long it takes to make a complete backup of each computer you want to protect.”

Any off-site backup company should let you upload and download files from any computer connected to the Internet, using nothing more than a Web browser. Not all do. Charging customers based on the amount of data being stored is eminently fair. Charging based on the number of computers those files came from, strikes me as a rip-off.

A few days ago, David Strom wrote an article in The New York Times about making off-site file backups over the Internet. There is no one right answer when it comes to making backups, but I’d like to expand on a few points he raised.

Mozy is one of the off-site storage companies mentioned in the article. I wrote a two-part review of Mozy back in July. Perhaps the most important point about Mozy is that it will, at times, delete your backup files. Anyone who mentions Mozy and leaves out this fact has not done their homework.

Features and services

Many file storage companies provide you with software. Just say no. For one thing, using their software makes it harder to switch companies in the future. Also, there is no way to have real security if the same organization is both encrypting your files and storing them. Finally, it may limit you when it comes time to restore files, and, in your hour of need, that’s the last thing you’ll want to deal with.

Off-site storage is not the appropriate medium for complete backups of a computer. Off-site backup is only appropriate for your important files. For most broadband users, uploading large files is slow, drastically slower than downloads (the exceptions being fiber, SDSL and T1 connections). And the cost of off-site storage usually increases with the amount of data stored.

So few people back up the files on their computers; you don’t want to start off on the wrong foot.

The Web currency of user data and clickstreams is also vital to Joyent’s business. The company has 10,000 customers, handles 5 billion page views a month, and provides infrastructure for 25 percent of the third-party applications running on Facebook. Through its Player’s Club, Joyent provides free hosting to Facebook developers, as well as OpenSocial developers, in exchange for the data.

However, Joyent isn’t limiting the usage, and it will provide unlimited compute, storage, memory, and bandwidth, as well as root control. Google’s App Engine, which is in beta, is limited to 500MB of storage, 200 million megacycles of CPU, and 10GB of bandwidth per day. Young figures that this would support 25,000 unique users a month, while Joyent will support a million users for free.

“If I were Google, I would buy every big Web application, such as Six Apart and WordPress, out there to get access to clickstream and user data as people move across the Web. I think that is what App Engine is all about,” Young said.

With all the hand-wringing about Google’s increasing footprint and clout, the company is contributing code to the open-source world and driving data portability standards, such as the OpenSocial and Social Graph APIs. David Recordon notes the potential for App Engine sites to log in via Google Accounts.

If Google’s growth trends continue to accelerate, the company will colonize more Web territory, collecting more data and monetizing it across billions of users and sites. So far, Google has a head start, with its highly profitable search and ad business (which is why Microsoft is in hot pursuit of Yahoo) and is moving into new application territory.

If you extrapolate from Google’s growing share of search and advertising, and include a growing share of Web applications through its APIs and the fledgling App Engine, you could imagine a Google that becomes the dominant Internet operating system and infrastructure provider. It’s still the early days of cloud computing, but the ground is shifting.

“It’s funny that we waged the war to free ourselves of (the) shackles of Microsoft and Hailstorm (a failed attempt to manage personal data),” said David Young, CEO of cloud infrastructure provider and App Engine competitor Joyent. “Now, for some reason, the digerati are anxious to run into exact same thing with Google. It’s not evil, but they are tracking users and clickstreams, which (are) the real currency of the Web, and most people don’t care. If you can get all data, you can target ads and the user experience, such as showing a site in a different color, depending on user profile.”

Today that means that every App Engine site could have a shared sense of a user; the ability to understand who someone is across different App Engine sites and Google services. (Obviously I’d love to see Google move toward supporting OpenID for this sort of thing, but small bits piece by piece work for me.)

“We gather the data and work with ad networks to help their clients target sites,” Young said. Joyent works with ad networks such as Slide, RockYou, Social Media, Federated Media, and AdBrite. “With billions of visitors, Google can gather the data on its own, but the social networks allow companies like Joyent to get access to it as well,” he said. Basically, the majority of developers are willing to share their user data in exchange for free infrastructure services.

Imagine if Google Accounts added support for the (upcoming) OpenSocial REST APIs. All of a sudden, each of these App Engine sites could start injecting activity and querying for activity across each other. Maybe you’ll argue that this just means that Google Accounts could become the next big social network, but isn’t it a bit different when this functionality is just a part of your hosting infrastructure? What if Google Accounts ignored the notion of friends and instead left that to actual social networks? If done right, this really could be the first shipping glimpse of the distributed social Web that there is to come.

In light of App Engine, Joyent is offering a similar infrastructure service (but using MySQL, Postgre SQL, or Oracle databases rather than Google’s Bigtable and file system). Like App Engine, the Joyent “Garden of Eden” program includes free infrastructure for Python Web applications in exchange for customer information and clickstream data.

(Credit:
Joyent)

Google’s announcement of its App Engine has naturally generated a lot of buzz, as well as some fear, uncertainty, and doubt. There is the concern that Google will corral even more user data via its App Engine, becoming a kind of 21st century data and advertising baron, as Microsoft has been the operating system and productivity software baron in the last three decades.

The old guard–Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Cisco Systems, Oracle–haven’t yet revealed plans for colonizing Web users with end-to-end, cloud-based platforms. They have stood by while Salesforce.com becomes a company with $1 billion in annual revenue. Will they be standing on the sidelines as Google and others, such as the 22-person Joyent, prove the viability of cloud platforms as a service?

David Young, CEO, Joyent

Want to turn a picture of your girlfriend into a cat? You can now do so using FotoFlexer's editing tools right inside of Photobucket.

The functionality is scheduled to go live early tomorrow morning. In the meantime we have a couple of screenshots of the new functionality after the break.

(Credit:
Photobucket Inc.)

(Credit:
Photobucket Inc.)

I got a chance to talk to Alex Welch, CEO and co-founder of Photobucket about picking FotoFlexer over building out an in-house editing tool. Welch said that editing was the No. 1 user requested feature on the service, and that choosing an outside company’s technology was the better choice given the time frame they were looking at. He said building an in-house editing tool would have simply taken too long.

In regards to the company’s relationship with Adobe, going forward Welch said they’re sticking with FotoFlexer as the integrated editing tool and that the upcoming Photoshop Express looks to be more of a “finishing tool” than what users were looking for. Welch said FotoFlexer provides more of what “our demographics really want.”

In many ways this is an answer to what Flickr has done with Picnik, a move that has cross pollinated both services with new users, and given a hefty boost to Picnik’s traffic and premium service subscriptions (see more on this). FotoFlexer has a “professional” service of its own, although it’s completely free, unlike competitor Picnik, which charges $25 a year for access to advanced editing tools that later trickle down to free users.

Despite having a working relationship integrating Adobe’s media editing technologies on videos, photo hosting giant Photobucket isn’t waiting around for Adobe to release Photoshop Express, and instead has partnered with FotoFlexer to serves as its de facto editor. Starting tomorrow, users will be able to edit any photo right inside Photobucket using FotoFlexer’s editing tools. Edited photos can replace or be stored alongside existing shots.

Photobucket users can now edit shots without leaving the site using FotoFlexer.