We launched Google.cn in January 2006 in the belief that the benefits of increased access to information for people in China and a more open Internet outweighed our discomfort in agreeing to censor some results. At the time we made clear that “we will carefully monitor conditions in China, including new laws and other restrictions on our services. If we determine that we are unable to achieve the objectives outlined we will not hesitate to reconsider our approach to China.”

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Internet companies and civil liberties groups were alarmed this spring when a U.S. Senate bill proposed handing the White House the power to disconnect private-sector computers from the Internet.

They’re not much happier about a revised version that aides to Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, have spent months drafting behind closed doors. CNET News has obtained a copy of the 55-page draft of S.773 (excerpt), which still appears to permit the president to seize temporary control of private-sector networks during a so-called cybersecurity emergency.

The new version would allow the president to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” relating to “non-governmental” computer networks and do what’s necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for “cybersecurity professionals,” and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

Here’s the real kicker:

Probably the most controversial language begins in Section 201, which permits the president to “direct the national response to the cyber threat” if necessary for “the national defense and security.” The White House is supposed to engage in “periodic mapping” of private networks deemed to be critical, and those companies “shall share” requested information with the federal government. (“Cyber” is defined as anything having to do with the Internet, telecommunications, computers, or computer networks.)

Now we see the true purpose of this bill.  The government wants to know what is on our computer networks.  Imagine the possibilities for a moment.  Let’s say there is another (God forbid) terrorist attack.  The government already has the power to ground all air travel.  Now they can pull the plug on the internet as well.  What better way to suppress dissent could their be?  The government already effectively controls the majority of the mass media.  Oh wait, this is for our safety.  There I go being paranoid again…

Shavlik Technologies is offering customers 1 million reasons to dump their resource-guzzling patch management, configuration management, and antivirus solutions with a rebate program that provides a cash incentive to customers who trade up to a more efficient way to manage these critical IT tasks.

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IT security and operations news outlets are filled with stories of the impact (down time, reduced productivity, sensitive data compromise, breaches) of these rusted out clunkers on your business. Just last week Microsoft released two out-of-band patches. The Microsoft WU/MU team spent the week in a full scramble to correct bad data that left Windows Update and WSUS users thinking they were patched when, in fact, they were not patched and vulnerable to exploit.

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• Tired of antivirus bloatware solutions that guzzle system resources but don’t stop today’s malware.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAUyaELfwBo&feature=related

Putting a crank-shaft on the XO laptop was a mistake, but the biggest mistake was not having Sugar run as an application “on a vanilla Linux laptop”, said OLPC founder and chairman Nicholas Negroponte.

“Sugar should have been an application [residing] on a normal operating system,” he told ZDNet Asia in an interview. “But what we did…was we had Sugar do the power management, we had Sugar do the wireless management–it became sort of an omelet. The Bios talked directly with Sugar, so Sugar became a bit of a mess.”

After spending several years working in IT as a career I have learned that there is at times a disconnect between the words of management and the actual inner workings of a product.  This looked funny to me so I wondered what the actual people working behind the scenes thought of this.  Turns out Sugar wasn’t as bad as advertised:

Here’s the problem: through a somewhat regrettable set of naming decisions, the name “Sugar” came to represent two entirely different things. It was the name for the new learning-oriented graphical interface that OLPC was building, but it was also the name for the entire XO operating system, one tiny part of which was Sugar the GUI, and the rest of which was mostly Fedora Linux.

Nicholas, evidently, still remains blissfully unaware of any of this. As is plain to see from his own words, what he considers to be the biggest mistake of the project has nothing to do with Sugar the GUI, and everything to do with the gross, hairy, complicated systems development work that OLPC was doing to support the XO’s special hardware features. And to be clear, I mean “short bus special”, not “shiny unicorn special”.

Let me explain something to you. For most of OLPC’s existence, we had about two guys working on Sugar the UI. They were GUI developers, with GNOME backgrounds. They were not at all the same people doing systems development work to support our hardware. No resources were taken away from systems development to do Sugar. If Sugar hadn’t happened at all, we would have still had to do all the systems work to get Linux working on the XO, and it would have still taken just as long. So if you’re looking for things to blame, Sugar is not the droid you are looking for.

In truth, the XO ships a pretty shitty operating system, and this fact has very little to do with Sugar the GUI. It has a lot to do with the choice of incompetent hardware vendors that provided half-assedly built, unsupported and unsupportable components with broken closed-source firmware blobs that OLPC could neither examine nor fix.

So we wound up with a keyboard whose keys get stuck. A dual-mode touchpad, capacitive and resistive, where one mode doesn’t work at all, and the other makes the cursor spontaneously jump around and sometimes shuts off the touchpad altogether, prompting OLPC kernel developers to beg for saner hardware in the next round. We had board engineering issues that made power management practically impossible. We had a custom display controller chip that was incomplete in some regards, and completely broken in others. We had an embedded controller that blocks keyboard events and stops machine suspend, and to which we — after a long battle — received the source, under strict NDA, only to find a jungle of nested if statements, twelve levels deep, and no code history. (The company that wrote the code doesn’t use version control, see. They put dates into code comments when they make changes, and the developers mail each other zip files with new versions.) And we had a wireless chip that is so far beyond fucked, it’s just about funny.

(Each of those words is a different link. Click them all, I dare you.)

Thinking back, there’s a hardware incident I remember particularly fondly: one of our vendors sent us a kernel driver patch which enhanced support for their component in our machine. They chose to implement the enhancement by setting up a hole which allowed any unprivileged user to take over the kernel, prompting our kernel guy to send a private e-mail to the OLPC tech team demanding that, in the future, we avoid buying hardware from companies whose programmers are, direct quote, “crack-smoking hobos”.

In the end, Nicholas’ bit of interview nonsense just doesn’t pass the smell test. Customers aren’t stupid. There’s close to a million XOs out there; if Sugar was OLPC’s biggest mistake, Windows on the XO would be selling like hotcakes. Let me remind you, then, that the number of Windows-based XOs that OLPC has sold is exactly zero.

So next time you hear Nicholas break out the egg metaphors and wave his hands about the Sugar that doomed it all, shrug and smile. Hell, If I were a meaner person, I’d ask Nicholas why it is that Windows — you know, the Windows from Microsoft, mercifully unstained with the mistake of Sugar — can’t even shut down an XO without throwing up a blue screen of death.

I honestly don’t know what to say to this.  It’s a shame that the top down management style of the OLPC project nearly killed it.  I remember sitting around with my IT buddies excited about the future of Sugar and the XO laptop.  To be honest, most of us have moved on to something else.  What a shame…

To hear the media tell it, the United States suffered a major cyberattack last week. Stories were everywhere. “Cyber Blitz hits U.S., Korea” was the headline in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. North Korea was blamed.

Where were you when North Korea attacked America? Did you feel the fury of North Korea’s armies? Were you fearful for your country? Or did your resolve strengthen, knowing that we would defend our homeland bravely and valiantly?

My guess is that you didn’t even notice, that – if you didn’t open a newspaper or read a news website – you had no idea anything was happening. Sure, a few government websites were knocked out, but that’s not alarming or even uncommon. Other government websites were attacked but defended themselves, the sort of thing that happens all the time. If this is what an international cyberattack looks like, it hardly seems worth worrying about at all.

Bruce Schneier is right, God bless him.  Someone has to say it.  The Big Media have blown this attack all out of proportion.  It would have been even worse if Michael Jackson hadn’t died this quarter.  It’s certainly not a laughing matter, but cyberwars just aren’t that damaging.  Websites and internet facing services are under near constant attack, no different than the assault from a cyberwar.  Please stop hyping this issue.  Let’s all spend our time securing our networks instead.  Even President Obama couldn’t resist a little bit of FUD:

In May, President Obama gave a major speech on cybersecurity. He was right when he said that cybersecurity is a national security issue, and that the government needs to step up and do more to prevent cyberattacks. But he couldn’t resist hyping the threat with scare stories: “In one of the most serious cyber incidents to date against our military networks, several thousand computers were infected last year by malicious software — malware,” he said. What he didn’t add was that those infections occurred because the Air Force couldn’t be bothered to keep its patches up to date.

This is the face of cyberwar: easily preventable attacks that, even when they succeed, only a few people notice. Even this current incident is turning out to be a sloppily modified five-year-old worm that no modern network should still be vulnerable to.

Securing our networks doesn’t require some secret advanced NSA technology. It’s the boring network security administration stuff we already know how to do: keep your patches up to date, install good anti-malware software, correctly configure your firewalls and intrusion-detection systems, monitor your networks. And while some government and corporate networks do a pretty good job at this, others fail again and again.

Enough of the hype and the bluster. The news isn’t the attacks, but that some networks had security lousy enough to be vulnerable to them.

I support the Iranian freedom movement. You can find out more about this important movement by following #IranElection on Twitter or on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. God go with the people of Iran during this difficult time.  I am praying for the people of Iran.  You should be too…

Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a “new modern-day sort of communists,” a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism.

Already in the first paragraph we see several terms that are charged with meaning.  No matter how we use them, words have their own definition.  If a writer chooses to use a word loaded with negative connotations it will carry that meaning no matter how hard it is explained away.  Starting off the article by comparing free and open source software to communism is a tough way to start.  The author does tries to explain it away but the words still ring heavily at the beginning.

The author does at least admit to the overly charged nature of his words:

I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.

I disagree.  There are plenty of unsoiled terms we may use.  Why not adopt some of the language of the Creative Commons movement?  Can we not refer to open source software as a Town Commons?  How about using the term freedom?  I’ll let the elites bounce around their ideas but we have to come up with something.  We must move away from Microsoft FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and politically charged terms when trying to describe the open source movement.  The average American uses terms such as socialism, communism and fascism interchangeably, even though they are very different.  They simply don’t know the difference.  When the word socialism is read the majority of Americans immediately associate it as bad.

Socialism is a legal framework.  The government imposes a system on the people and everyone is compelled (either willingly or unwillingly) to join and function within the system.  This is not the case with social networks.  No one is compelled to create or edit a Wikipedia article.  No one has to upload their entire lives to Facebook.  Twitter is voluntary.  While there is greater power in collaborative social networks, all are free to leave.  This is surely not the case with socialism.

Using this terminology makes sense to people like me, but to the rest of the general public it really does hurt the overall movement.  Socialism is a system that while similar, is not a very good comparison.  You should read the article.  I am interested in what you have to say about it.  I do however, regret this article, and hope that it doesn’t set the movement back too far.

“So just think about the last six years, all the things that happened,” Schwarzenegger said Monday. “For instance, the Iraq war, the country’s first African-American president … all of this you wouldn’t have in those textbooks.”

A six year cycle?  An entire class of students could pass through high school and not study these recent events!  With the technology we have today, this is simply inexcusable.  We must do something.  Why not use open source textbooks?  From the article:

While not all open-source books are free, they usually have more lenient copyright licenses than do print textbooks – or digital books provided by mainstream publishers. Educators can download and distribute them at will without facing additional costs. Typically, the cost of producing the text is offset by foundations or private donations.

The open source license makes perfect sense.  This frees up students and teachers to be able to copy and use the information contained within the textbooks, free from the restrictions of traditional copyright.  This important change would break the strict control on knowledge, granting the freedom to innovate, adapt and stay current with the latest information.

I was discussing issues of copyright just last week at our annual conference. Ten years ago when I was in college (ok, I’m dating myself here) almost no one had any computer equipment in the classroom.  We carried around our textbooks and used ink pens and notebooks to take notes.  Now when I visit a college campus everyone has laptops, iPods, iPhones, Blackberries etc…  The times have changed.  The educational opportunities are endless.  I asked the question what education would look like in another ten years?  The answer we came up with was that textbooks would be electronic.  The lines will have blurred between print and digital such that a student would have one device that does everything.  Perhaps I was wrong.  It looks like ten years from now is going to happen a lot earlier than I thought.