Following one of basic principals of best practices– you can't manage what you don't know, a new initiative is driving tech innovation. They're lots of things that we are chastized to "manage" but not armed with the data that informs the actual usage of whatever we supposed to be managing. Take all the pleas to do a better job conserving energy. CFL lightbulbs abound, when a simpler way to reduce energy consumption may have been just to turn off the lights. But I digress, last fall the CTO of the United States, Aneesh Chopra, proposed that utility companies allow consumers a simple way to access their utility data. First– how cool is it that at least one branch of goverment gets that having a tech position might be a good thing to inform policy– I'm looking at you Congress. The Green Button is what that initiative spawned and last week three big utility comapnies in Califormian announced that they had a green button on their web sites.
The idea, realsing consumer data, originally rolled out as a way for veterans to access their medical records. Let's pause for a moment there and think what a great world we would live in if every medical record you have could be downloaded by you, and thus armed with a usb drive, you could see your next doctor armed with your entire history.
Meanwhile new apps and web services are actively being built around the concept of the green button, because that is how tech innovation comes about. And why is NYC becoming the tech innovation leader? Because wise peeps in NYC get that investing in startup ideas is economic development. Sadly, Connecticut misses out on that concept.
SCOTUS has ruled, sticking a GPS transponder on a car without a warrant is bad. It was unanimous. The details of the case concerned a drug dealer, and the attempt by law enforcement to monitor the car for 28 days. Interesting though that the rationale for the option was divided 5-4 with Scalia writing for the majority and Roberts Jr. Kennedy, Thomas and Sotomayor joining in on the majority opinion. They wrote, "We hold that the government’s installation of a G.P.S. device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a search."
So far so good. But the 4 concurring justices pointed out that the majority just used 18th-century legal concepts on a 21st-century technology. They were looking for a contemporary argument on a reasonable expectation of privacy. Alito, Ginsburg, Breyer and Kagan joined the concurrence.
Lately it seems that just about every major business with a database online has suffered a data breach. This is bad news for the health of the Internet, but not something that government is in a position to solve. Yet:
HARTFORD – Concerned about a recent hacking attack that may have affected more than 24 million customers, Attorney General George Jepsen, with support from nine other states, has asked Zappos.com, Inc. about its efforts to protect private customer information and its response to the breach.
The Attorney General wrote to the chief executive officer of the on-line retailer’s Nevada headquarters Friday seeking information about how the breach occurred, how affected customers were identified and notified and any corrective plans developed in response.
“This incident raises serious concerns about the possibility of fraud and targeted e-mail ‘phishing’ or other scams, as well as questions about the effectiveness of the company’s measures to protect the confidentiality and security of private information that it receives from consumers,” Attorney General Jepsen wrote.
Published reports said the hacking affected parts of the company’s internal network and systems, compromising a wide array of personal customer information, including names, billing and shipping addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and encrypted passwords.
Jepsen wrote on behalf of Connecticut and Attorneys General in nine other states: Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina and Pennsylvania among them. Two states have laws prohibiting disclosure of investigations.
It's too bad that government is still filled with the tech clueless, because asking what a company does after the fact, does nothing. The important question is what they are doing to protect data, which would put them in the arcane world of hashed passwords, usernames, and seperation of login and transaction data, just to start.
Government doesn't understand tech, a problem when they introduce legislation, but a bigger problem in that they don't even begin to understand how to protect people.
Zappos.com is a great company and invests deeply in its customer experience and data infrastructure. The line of questions listed above just shows how out of touch Jepsen's department of lawyers is.
Now that the tweets and chatter has digested former Senator Chris Dodd's statements about SOPA and PIPA, the response was crowdsourced and the result, a whitehouse petition to invetigate Chris Dodd for bribery. You too can sign it at this link. I did, for the simple reason that on page 18 of yesterdays New York Times there was this gem of an article:
Soon after he retired last year as one of the leading liberals in Congress, former Representative William D. Delahunt of Massachusetts started his own lobbying firm with an office on the 16th floor of a Boston skyscraper. One of his first clients was a small coastal town that has agreed to pay him $15,000 a month for help in developing a wind energy project.
Amid the revolving door of congressmen-turned-lobbyists, there is nothing particularly remarkable about Mr. Delahunt’s transition, except for one thing. While in Congress, he personally earmarked $1.7 million for the same energy project.
So today, his firm, the Delahunt Group, stands to collect $90,000 or more for six months of work from the town of Hull, on Massachusetts Bay, with 80 percent of it coming from the pot of money he created through a pair of Energy Department grants in his final term in office, records and interviews show.
It's time to stop the revolving door of politicians who abuse the trust of the American people to do the right thing for the public good. Dodd's implied bribery is just another form the the same old self-serving thing.
Word tricking accross the tuebs is that Harry Reid is pulling the vote on SOPA. But our former Senator Chris Dodd is showing temper tantrum on of all places foxnews.
"Candidly, those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake," Dodd told Fox News. "Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake."
Dodd, who became CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America after leaving the Senate in 2011, noted the movie "Avatar" was stolen by online pirates 21 million times. Such acts, he said, threaten to decimate his industry.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/
If you think you understand what the copyright law is all about, you might want to review the concepts in this delightful video produced by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University. How did we get endless copyright terms? Why the folks who contriuted the clips used below.
Because Connecticut Innovations, that quasi public agency self-charged with leading um, innovation in Connecticut has done such a great job creating tech jobs, Governor Malloy and the DECD are throwing more money at them. From the Hartford Business Journal:
Connecticut Innovations Inc. announced the ambitious business-development program Wednesday, one it says aims to build jobs.
The $125 million in new funding from the state was included in Gov. Dannel P. Malloy's jobs bill, which was signed into law in October, CI said.
CI says its plan is to match this state funding for each of the next five years with its existing cash and funding from its investment returns.
"CI's capabilities are essential to the success of the technology sector in Connecticut," Malloy said in a statement announcing the initiative. "Adding to their tool kit and providing more funding will allow the organization to accelerate its success in creating jobs and growing Connecticut's economy."
Included in the plan is:
• $4 million per year for CI's pre-seed program, which offers loans to support the formation of new Connecticut technology companies.• $22 million per year for seed stage and Series A investments, which help entrepreneurs grow existing businesses, and for follow-on investments in CI portfolio companies.
• $6.5 million per year for a newly developed loan program, which provides growth and working capital for technology companies.
• $7 million per year for the aggressive recruitment of emerging technology companies nationally and internationally. CI plans to work with the Department of Economic and Community Development (DECD) and other state agencies to design a relocation incentive package, similar to the governor's "First Five" initiative.
• $4 million per year to help Connecticut companies capture more of the federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funds each year, as well as increase industry partnerships and the state's technology talent pipeline.
• $4.8 million per year to establish technology business accelerator hubs, which will provide support services to startups, and to create a corporate technology transfer initiative.
Arrrghhh Pirates. Let's think about piracy for a moment, as in classic piracy on the high seas, not Johnny Depp's Pirates of the Caribbean. You see in the olden days, pirates used ships to sail the high seas and then find other ships carrying valuable cargo, and commence an intricate battle that may or may not involve swashbucking swordfights. They boarded those ships and pillaged and plundered and stole the cargo. Let's be clear here, they removed the cargo, depriving the rightful owner of the cargo the rights of ownership. So chests of pieces of eight, and baubles of gemstones etc. were taken. That is piracy.
Flash forward to the days of Yahoo! instead of yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, and we get the label piracy attached to just about anything. But in the case of the Internet, or as former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens once said, the tubes, piracy has morphed from an action that deprives ownership to one that simply deprives profit. That's a whole lot of important distinction.
You see, making a copy of something doesn't deprive ownership. The original is safe in the hands of whomever owns it. But now another replica exists. So instead of one person enjoying the use of let's say, a post card of a bottle of rum, two or more people can enjoy the same postcard. There is no loss of ownership.
But wait, you say, what about if the original owner wanted to sell that postcard. If there are all these copies that you can get for free, no one will buy the original. Well that's an interesting philosophy there. But we already know what happens when massive amounts of copies get made that are free. What happens is that more people become aware of the original and not surprisingly, want to buy it. We know this because of the lowly VHS tape. Remember those?
In this video clip Steve jobs is talking about libraries, computer games and interactive learning.
This is a wonderful short film about two old skool businesses. If you are into paper and letterpress printing then you will enjoy this.
ink&paper from Ben Proudfoot on Vimeo.
Directed by Ben Proudfoot
Original Music by Kyle Malkin
Sound Design & Mix by David Bolen
Show your support:
Aardvark Letterpress
2500 West 7th Street
Los Angeles, CA
(213) 388-2271
www.aardvarkletterpress.com/
McManus & Morgan Paper
2506 West 7th Street
Los Angeles, CA
(213) 387-4433
www.mcmanusmorgan.com
October 2011.
ben@benproudfoot.com
www.benproudfoot.com
www.dinnerwithfred.com
