Netizen

Monday, September 06, 2010

Passwords For Security

Image by Zebra Pares via Flickr

New York Times: A Strong Password Isn’t the Strongest Security: MAKE your password strong, with a unique jumble of letters, numbers and punctuation marks. But memorize it — never write it down. And, oh yes, change it every few months. These instructions are supposed to protect us. But they don’t....... Keylogging software, which is deposited on a PC by a virus, records all keystrokes — including the strongest passwords you can concoct — and then sends it surreptitiously to a remote location. ..... antivirus software could detect and block many kinds of keyloggers, but “there’s no guarantee that it gets everything.” ..... sites that allowed relatively weak passwords were busy commercial destinations, including PayPal, Amazon.com and Fidelity Investments. The sites that insisted on very complex passwords were mostly government and university sites. ..... “If an account is locked for 24 hours after three unsuccessful attempts,” they write, “a six-digit PIN can withstand 100 years of sustained attack.” .....“Eat your broccoli; a strong password is good for security.”

What are your options? You can still go for a strong password. You can still change them periodically. You can still get anti virus software. You can hope it is illegal for someone to try and get your password, but this is a big world. The nation state is an ant to the cyber criminals who mostly work remotely.

What is your prayer then? That you are personally too insignificant to be snooped upon? That there are too many people like you out there?

Password theft is like identity theft. Can you imagine the inconvenience of someone having stolen your password and then changed it? Your contacts are not going to think your password got stolen. They are going to think you are being rude in not responding to their emails.

Maybe you can inform your 10 or 20 key contacts. But it would not be possible to inform them all.

For the short term, my bet is on good anti virus software. Keep it renewed. Most people do. And I am glad. Bill Gates once promised to incorporate anti virus software right into Windows. And he went ahead and retired.

It is a relentless fight between good and evil. But common sense is a good armor for the most part. And, yes, there are too many people like you out there. It is a numbers game. It is statistical. You are for the most part safe. Just keep to common sense. Keep a strong password. And keep your anti virus software renewed.

Safety online is kind of like safety offline. There are some common sense ground rules to follow. Even so you might fall a victim. It is a numbers game. If you do, know what to do.

Sunday, September 05, 2010

Are You Social?

Do you eat alone often? Are you checking emails while eating? How often do you eat with loved ones?

Do you turn the phone off at meetings? Or are you clandestinely checking email while others are talking?

Do you tell people off because you are too busy with Twitter and Facebook?

When you walk down the street, are you taking the street in? Or are you glued instead to your small screen?

When you ride the subway, are you enjoying the crowd? Do you sometimes say hello to complete strangers?

How often do you actually hang out with friends in person? Or has Facebook made that less necessary?

How many friends do you have? People you really know, people you will go out with for a drink, perhaps a lunch? When was the last time you made a new friend?

Do you have non tech friends? Perhaps people who are not on Twitter.

Can you hold conversations? Or do you find yourself longing for your small screen two minutes into one?

Do you spend at least one day a week when you don't touch a device? No computer, no phone.

Do you exercise? Do you eat well? Do you sleep well?

Saturday, September 04, 2010

Howard Lindzon's The Web Is Dead Series

Fred Wilson (Is The Web Dead?)
Brad Feld
Chris Dixon

Data Threesomes

Image via CrunchBase

Chris Dixon: Web Services Should Be Both Federated And Extensible: The next step in this evolution is to create web services that are both federated (APIs) and extensible (Apps)..... The combination of Facebook’s data (social graph and check-ins) and SimpleGeo data/algorithms would create much more advanced feature possibilities than either service acting alone...... a “data threesome” ..... Allowing websites to be federated and extensible will open up a whole new wave of innovation

Two memes have been making the rounds: the web is dead, women in tech.

Chris Dixon, in this post, is referring to mash ups, high level mash ups. He is talking of "data threesomes" and how that would lead to "a new wave of innovation."

Some people have commented saying it is already being done. If it is, it is not mainstream yet.
People have been building APIs upon APIs. There is much data sharing going on, but not entirely enough.

What really matters is the end product, that final interface that the end user interacts with. A simple interface sitting on top of rich data interactions is what you want to shoot for.

NY Tech Scene Heating Up

Image via CrunchBase

Wall Street Journal: New York's Tech Start-Up Scene Comes Of Age: over the last decade, New York has been building a real tech center, where software, media, and ad-related startups are thriving, a venture capital community is growing and serial entrepreneurs are as commonplace as they are in Silicon Valley. ...... a general feeling here, a buzz, that there is momentum here ...... "As one of the most successful financial exits from the dot-com era, DoubleClick made people in Silicon Valley realize that there may still be some fire coming out of New York" ...... "Back then it was a gold rush mentality," he said of the late 1990s. "Now it's building a business." ...... the New York region ranks number four in total venture capital investment, after Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Boston. ...... in terms of funding for software companies, New York ranked only second to Silicon Valley for venture capital funding in the second quarter ..... One New York startup that is well-known in Silicon Valley is Foursquare ..... "New York is a challenging city to build location-based services for because of its density, so once they built a product that could work well in New York City, they figured it would work well in other, smaller cities as well." ..... Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is now seen as a veteran among New York venture capitalists ..... there are now more angel investors and startup incubators in New York. Venture capitalists are also now more willing to provide seed funding than they had in the past. .... No one calls New York "Silicon Alley" anymore. "Now we just call it New York," Ms. Halper said. "The industry in New York has finally come of age."

I am waiting for two things. I am waiting for the Great Recession to get completely over and done with. And you will know that has happened when Facebook goes IPO. Facebook is waiting for the recession to completely end before it will file. And I am waiting for a tech company in town to go IPO. I think that company right now is looking like FourSquare. But I need to be hush hush about it because I am superstitious. An IPO is such a big deal. And it is not a given.

A few IPOs and New York City will have finally arrived on the tech scene in a way I would like. The DoubleClick exit was grand, but it was no IPO. I have a feeling once we see our first IPO, we will see a string of them.

And I am fervently hoping a tech revival in this city is not just about dot coms and software. I hope this city makes strides also in other emerging tech sectors like clean tech and bio tech and nano.

A lot of smart people who go to top colleges in this country end up in this city. It is that allure of New York City. It is that magic. So far this city has not made the best use of all that talent. This city has needed a painful recession to shake off the Wall Street suction pump and to release talent into more meaningful sectors like emerging tech.

Slowly but surely it is happening though. This city is going bonkers.

New York City has a huge advantage over Silicon Valley. That is that Silicon Valley by now is like this big, old, mature company. New York City - the city - is a startup. That cultural advantage is priceless.

Net Neutrality Woes

Image via Wikipedia

New York Times: The Struggle for What We Already Have: When Google and Verizon, a month ago, put together a well-meaning proposal for enforceable net neutrality rules, the two companies were vilified by the net neutrality purists — because they wanted to exempt wireless..... Surely, this has to rank as the Mother of All Unintended Consequences: there is an outside chance that in its zeal to make net neutrality the law of the land, the F.C.C. could wind up as a regulator with very little to regulate..... Net neutrality is, in fact, incredibly complicated ...... Data networks, after all, have to be managed. The engineering is complex. The capacity is limited. Inevitably, some form of prioritization is bound to take place. Rules also have to be created that will give companies the incentive they need to spend the billions upon billions of dollars necessary to extend broadband’s reach and improve its speed, so we can catch up to, say, South Korea. ...... It has been desperately trying to find a way to re-establish jurisdiction over broadband services, while at the same time continuing to push for net neutrality. It has become a very complicated dance. ....... the Internet service providers have made it plain that they will sue to prevent the F.C.C. from asserting Title II jurisdiction over broadband. ...... The truth is, virtually every player involved wants the F.C.C. to have oversight over broadband services. ..... Consumers have come to expect an open Internet, and companies will violate net neutrality at their peril.

To most everybody it felt like Google did an about face. Google abandoning net neutrality? For the longest time Google had been one of the loudest voices for net neutrality. And then Google-Verizon happened.

The thing to do is not to face the reality of technical constraints of wireless broadband. The thing to do is to get rid of those constraints. There are technical solutions. There are market solutions. There are policy solutions.

Release more spectrum and fast. That is the policy solution. Introduce much more competition. That is the market solution. They did not achieve higher speeds and lower prices in South Korea by abandoning net neutrality.

Use of wireless broadband exploding is a good thing. Demand has been created. Now create supply.

Social: Bigger Than We Think

Former President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, make...

Image via Wikipedia

The Economist: Mining Social Networks: Untangling The Social Web: From retailing to counterterrorism, the ability to analyse social connections is proving increasingly useful ..... People at the top of the office or social pecking order often receive quick callbacks, do not worry about calling other people late at night and tend to get more calls at times when social events are most often organised, such as Friday afternoons. Influential customers also reveal their clout by making long calls, while the calls they receive are generally short. ...... Companies can spot these influencers, and work out all sorts of other things about their customers, by crunching vast quantities of calling data with sophisticated “network analysis” software. ..... Bharti Airtel, India’s biggest mobile operator, which handles over 3 billion calls a day ..... there are more than 100 programs for network analysis, also known as link analysis or predictive analysis ...... Bharti Airtel employs only about 100 analysts to keep tabs on its 135m subscribers. ....... broadening data mining to include analysis of social networks makes new things possible. ..... In some companies, e-mails are analysed automatically to help bosses manage their workers. Employees who are often asked for advice may be good candidates for promotion ...... If a person discusses a particular Department of Defence payment with an individual not officially linked to the deal, SRA’s software may notice it. ...... Richmond’s police have started monitoring Facebook, MySpace and Twitter messages to determine where the rowdiest festivities will be. On big party nights, the department now saves about $15,000 on overtime pay, because officers are deployed to areas that the software deems ripe for criminal activity. ..... turns out that the key terrorists in a group are often not the leaders, but rather seemingly low-level people, such as drivers and guides, who keep addresses and phone numbers memorised. Such people tend to stand out in network models because of their high level of connectedness ...... The capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was due in large part to the mapping of the social networks of his former chauffeurs ...... Called SOMA Terror Organization Portal, it analyses a wide range of information about politics, business and society in Lebanon to predict, with surprising accuracy, rocket attacks by the country’s Hizbullah militia on Israel. ....... An authoritarian government, for instance, may have difficulties slowing the spread of a new idea in a certain medium—say, internet chatter about a book that explains how corruption undermines job creation. ..... diplomatic services are mapping the “tipping point” when ideas go mainstream in spite of government repression. ..... Riots, bloody elections and crackdowns, among other things, can be forecast with improving accuracy by crunching data on food production, unemployment, drug busts, home evictions and slum growth detected in satellite images. ..... In relatively closed countries, like Egypt, rapid shifts in social networks can trigger upheaval ......

Perhaps. But I never underestimated the importance of social. Individuals are like cells. When many cells get together, organs are forms. Cell behavior does not predict organ behavior. Organs are a whole new level of reality. Organs have to be studied as organs. I scribbled along those lines in the early 1990s.

The difference is now software is making collection and analysis of pertinent data possible. Now it is actually possible to connect the dots, and bring results to use, to make concrete impacts. Social is increasingly becoming science. One of my frustrations during college years was that social was not science. Social was like physics before Newton. There was just too much muss.

When you come across a big thing, the inevitable question is what is next? What is the next big thing after social? Social will stay big. But perhaps the individual might get more attention down the line.

Friday, September 03, 2010

The Web Is Dead? Not So Fast

Wired: The Web Is Dead. Long Live The Internet: the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting...... You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone. ..... the top 10 Web sites accounted for 31 percent of US pageviews in 2001, 40 percent in 2006, and about 75 percent in 2010. ..... semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. ...... a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. ...... First Java, then Flash, then Ajax, then HTML5 — increasingly interactive online code — promised to put all apps in the cloud and replace the desktop with the webtop. Open, free, and out of control. ..... the machine-to-machine future that would be less about browsing and more about getting. ...... the Internet has meant the breakdown of incumbent businesses and traditional power structures ..... about 35 percent of all our media time is now spent on the Web — but ad dollars weren’t keeping pace. ..... TV — which also accounts for 35 percent of our media time, gets nearly 40 percent of ad dollars. ..... The Web is, after all, just one of many applications that exist on the Internet ..... The applications that account for more of the Internet’s traffic include peer-to-peer file transfers, email, company VPNs, the machine-to-machine communications of APIs, Skype calls, World of Warcraft and other online games, Xbox Live, iTunes, voice-over-IP phones, iChat, and Netflix movie streaming. ...... the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web. Fast beats flexible. ....... “It is a mistake to think of the Web browser as the apex of the PC’s evolution.” ...... the rise of junk-shop content providers — like Demand Media — which have determined that the only way to make money online is to spend even less on content than advertisers are willing to pay to advertise against it. This further cheapens online content, makes visitors even less valuable, and continues to diminish the credibility of the medium. ....... Every time you pick an iPhone app instead of a Web site, you are voting with your finger: A better experience is worth paying for, either in cash or in implicit acceptance of a non-Web standard. ..... While Google may have controlled traffic and sales, Apple controls the content itself. ..... the business forces lining up behind closed platforms are big and getting bigger. This is seen by many as a battle for the soul of the digital frontier..... Ecommerce continues to thrive on the Web, and no company is going to shut its Web site as an information resource. .... The Internet is the real revolution, as important as electricity; what we do with it is still evolving.

This Wired article has created quite a ruckus. But most people who have talked about it have missed the second part of the headline. Long live the internet. Even so, I think the iPhone is going to be a blip in the long run. The small screen web is going to feel like the big screen web, only on a smaller screen. Walled gardens have limited utility. The browser itself will morph.

I think this web is dead thinking is reflective of the hard economic times we are in. This thinking will evaporate after a turn around.

What's problematic about the diagram above is it is not counting video to be part of the web experience. The truth is video is part of the web experience that is exploding. The primarily text based web might be on the wane, but then the web was always meant to be a multi-media experience.

The biggest problem with the graph above is that it deals with percentages. The internet has been exploding. A 10% share today is not the same as a 40% share 10 years ago or a 70% share 15 years ago. I have a hard time believing the browser's share in terms of total number of users has not grown every year.

The open web is worth fighting for. Free trade is worth fighting for.

But, yes, the real product is the internet. The browser is just one way to access that internet. It remains my favorite way. I can't wait for HTML 5 to go mainstream.

A Fragmenting Web?
Is The Mobile Web In A Category Of Its Own?
Information Overload And Twitter
YouTube And Online Movies
HTML 5 Browser Wars

1500 Hits

Image by Randy Stewart via Flickr

1300 is better than 1000. 1500 is better than 1300. Although 1500 can't be the final figure for today. We have a few more hours to go.

Looks like Fred Wilson gave me about 80 page hits today. More important, he gave me a link. Enough of such high quality links, and you start showing up more often in the search results, my primary source of traffic.

A Fragmenting Web?

Image via Wikipedia

The web is not dying, (Dead Web?) and it is not fragmenting in an alarming way. What is happening can be compared to biological evolution over long periods of time. The end result is a richer ecosystem. The same is happening to the web. (Is The Mobile Web In A Category Of Its Own?)

The iPhone apps do not take away from the web. They might be these little, walled gardens but those little, walled gardens - most of them - do interact with the web in limited ways if not fully.

The birth of the web was like the Big Bang. There is no going back. I am not worried.

The Economist: The Future Of The Internet: A Virtual Counter-Revolution: The internet was a wide-open space, a new frontier. For the first time, anyone could communicate electronically with anyone else—globally and essentially free of charge. Anyone was able to create a website or an online shop, which could be reached from anywhere in the world using a simple piece of software called a browser, without asking anyone else for permission. The control of information, opinion and commerce by governments—or big companies, for that matter—indeed appeared to be a thing of the past. ........ the “cloud” is code for all kinds of digital services generated in warehouses packed with computers, called data centres, and distributed over the internet. ...... Only Apple’s latest iSomethings seem to inspire religious fervour ...... it appears to be balkanising, torn apart by three separate, but related forces. ..... governments are increasingly reasserting their sovereignty ...... big IT companies are building their own digital territories, where they set the rules and control or limit connections to other parts of the internet ...... network owners would like to treat different types of traffic differently, in effect creating faster and slower lanes on the internet. ...... Before the internet and the world wide web came along, this balkanised model was also the norm online. For a long time, for instance, AOL and CompuServe would not even exchange e-mails. ..... had telecoms firms, for instance, suspected how big it would become, they might have tried earlier to change its rules ...... Individuals have access to more information than ever, communicate more freely and form groups of like-minded people more easily. ...... In a more closed and controlled environment, an Amazon, a Facebook or a Google would probably never have blossomed as it did. ...... China’s “great firewall”. The Chinese authorities are using the same technology that companies use to stop employees accessing particular websites and online services. ........ allowed domain names entirely in other scripts. This makes things easier for people in, say, China, Japan or Russia, but marks another step towards the renationalisation of the internet. ...... Try viewing a television show on Hulu, a popular American video service, from Europe and it will tell you: “We’re sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed within the United States.” ..... “net neutrality”..... one of the internet’s founding principles: that every packet of data, regardless of its contents, should be treated the same way, and the best effort should always be made to forward it...... “the Tony Soprano vision of networking”... If operators were allowed to charge for better service, they could extort protection money from every website. ..... large internet firms like Amazon and Google have long redirected traffic onto private fast lanes that bypass the public internet to speed up access to their websites. ....... net neutrality has become far more politically controversial in America than it has elsewhere. This is a reflection of the relative lack of competition in America’s broadband market. .....“A technology is invented, it spreads, a thousand flowers bloom, and then someone finds a way to own it, locking out others.” ...... Android, Google’s smart-phone platform, which is less closed than Apple’s, is growing rapidly and gained more subscribers in America than the iPhone in the first half of this year. Intel and Nokia, the world’s biggest chipmaker and the biggest manufacturer of telephone handsets, are pushing an even more open platform called MeeGo. And as mobile devices and networks improve, a standards-based browser could become the dominant access software on the wireless internet as well.... There is just too much value in universal connectivity .... just as world trade can collapse if there is too much protectionism.

This article just tells me why Android is so important and why net neutrality is worth fighting for.

Is The Mobile Web In A Category Of Its Own?

Image representing John Battelle as depicted i...

Image via CrunchBase
To me the answer is obvious. Of course the mobile web is a category of its own. Where have you been these past few years?

Twitter, FourSquare: Mobile Web Thingies

Fred Wilson responded to my blog post this morning. He declared we are in resonance.

Fred Wilson: Mobile First Web Second

John Battelle responded disagreeing with Fred.

John Battelle: It's All The Web

Of course it is all one web. But we are also all one humanity. Why do we talk of different cultures and heritages? Why do we talk of white and black and brown and yellow people? To acknowledge and respect and celebrate those various heritages is not to deny the wholeness of humanity.

I am in disbelief that John Battelle said what he said. Where has he been these past few years? The mobile web has so taken off. It is not possible he missed out on that.

The meme that the web is dead that has really taken off recently in some circles does not go well with me. I don't think iPhone apps are anywhere close to competing with the larger web. The iPhone apps enrichen the ecosystem, but they are a small subcategory.

Dead Web?

Pages

Monday, September 06, 2010

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Sunday, September 05, 2010

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Saturday, September 04, 2010

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Friday, September 03, 2010

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