I have Karl Rove’s emails. No kidding. He and his team aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. They sent copies of their plans to GeorgeWBush.ORG instead of GeorgeWBush.COM addresses — and, heh heh, they ended up in my in-box.
The complaint also points out that many of the disgruntled customers posted messages on Apple's own forums only later to have their posts moderated or completely removed by Apple forum administrators.
"It appears that Apple has engaged in substantial editing of the posts on the discussion forum," the lawsuit indicates.
With a couple of keystrokes, you too can read the hidden history of the Coalition Provisional Authority, America's late, unlamented occupation government in Iraq.
Editor's note: The document discussed in this story can be viewed here, both with and without its hidden text.When I started studying the massive archive of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the American occupation government that ruled Iraq from April 21, 2003, to June 28, 2004, I expected my experience to be different. I didn't think any letters would fall in my lap, because the archive is paperless. The first archive of occupation created during the IT era, the CPA's virtual history can be found online at www.cpa-iraq.org, on thousands of pages that each begin "Long live the new Iraq!"
But I forgot to factor in the ubiquity of human error, and of Microsoft Word. It turns out the IT era really is different, after all. It took my 8-year-old son just a few seconds to shake loose some hidden history from within the official transcript of the CPA.My son made his discovery while impatiently waiting to play a computer game on my laptop. As part of a research project, I had downloaded 45 documents from a section of the CPA Web site known as Consolidated Weekly Reports. All but three of the documents were Microsoft Word. I had one of the Word documents up on my screen when my son starting toying with the computer mouse. Somehow, inadvertently, he managed to pull down the "View" menu at the top of the screen and select the "Mark up" option. If you are in a Word document where "Track changes" has been turned on, hitting "Mark up" will reveal all the deletions and insertions ever made in the document, complete with times, dates and (sometimes) the initials of the editors. When my son did it, all the deleted passages in a document with the innocuous name "Administrator's Weekly Economic Report" suddenly appeared in blue and purple. It was the electronic equivalent of seeing every draft of an author's paper manuscript and all the penciled changes made by the editors. I soon figured out that with a few keystrokes I could see the deleted passages in 20 of the 42 Word documents I'd downloaded. For an academic like myself it was a small treasure trove, and after I'd stopped hooting and hollering it took some time before I could convince my startled son that he hadn't done anything wrong.
One of my favorite tech blogs fell flat on its face Wednesday. Engadget posted a story yesterday claiming the expected June launch of the iPhone would be delayed until October and the Leopard October debut would be postponed until January. Engadget's credited its source as coming from an internal Apple e-mail.
The e-mail tip turned out to be false. But before anyone figured this out Apple's stock tumbled 3 percent losing $4 billion in value by the end of the trading day.
My job with Ivy is to offer public relations support to several companies [she named a number of the companies] and help them with media pitches, press releases, arranging and overseeing press interviews, etc. None of my clients are players in the DoD logistics space. In fact, I don’t even know of any logistics work that any of my clients are involved with.
The thrust of my editorial vision at MLF is to spotlight logistics and transportation programs/systems/initiatives across the DoD, DLA, TRANSCOM, the military services, agencies and their ports, fuel terminals, ammo plants, supply centers, arsenals and depots. While MLF will certainly cover technology, there are a lot of other non-technical aspects in this area.
Google is the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. Microsoft can at best limp along afterward.
When did Google take the lead? There will be a tendency to push it back to their IPO in August 2004, but they weren't setting the terms of the debate then. I'd say they took the lead in 2005. Gmail was one of the things that put them over the edge. Gmail showed they could do more than search.
Gmail also showed how much you could do with web-based software, if you took advantage of what later came to be called "Ajax." And that was the second cause of Microsoft's death: everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop. Even Microsoft sees that now.
In general I think using Google’s “office suite” is a realistic solution if you’re in a situation where you can count on having Internet connectivity most of the time. It’s especially useful if you need to access your information and content from lots of different computers or locations; and it offers some really nice tools for collaboration and sharing. I’m certainly not 100% converted yet, but if I had to, I could be.
There is no widely-agreed upon definition of service-oriented architecture other than its literal translation that it is an architecture that relies on service-orientation as its fundamental design principle. Service-orientation describes an architecture that uses loosely coupled services to support the requirements of business processes and users. Resources on a network[1] in an SOA environment are made available as independent services that can be accessed without knowledge of their underlying platform implementation.[2] These concepts can be applied to business, software and other types of producer/consumer systems.
The use of search engine technology as the main integration component in an information system. In a traditional business environment the architectural layer usually occupied by a relational database management system(RDBMS) is supplemented or replaced with a search engine or the indexing technology used to build such engines. Queries for information which would usually be performed using Structured Query Language(SQL) are replaced by keyword or fielded(or field-enabled) searches for structured, semi-structured, or unstructured data.
In a typical multi-tier or N tier architecture information is maintained in a Data-Tier where it can be stored and retrieved from a database or file system. The data tier is queried by the logic or business tier when information is needed using a data retrieval language like SQL.
As news events go, the "Bomb Iran" episode was surprisingly typical for the 2008 campaign. It resulted from an anonymous leak, most likely from a rival campaign, rather than the shoe-leather reporting of independent journalists. It was, in the lingo of the campaign trail, an "oppo dump," apparently compiled with the help of one of the vast, secretive propaganda machines housed in each of the major campaigns. In recent months, such invisible releases of information have often dominated the news cycle and have become ubiquitous for reporters covering the candidates. Official e-mails from campaigns regularly arrive in reporter in boxes with subject lines like "n/a," or "not for attribution." Unsigned white papers are delivered with damning facts about opponents' fundraising reports. Information is passed along by senior campaign officials in hushed tones on the telephone, only after the reporter has sworn never to reveal the source.
WASHINGTON -- World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz's top communications aide, Kevin Kellems, is singled out for criticism in a draft report prepared by a World Bank board committee investigating whether Mr. Wolfowitz used his position to secure generous compensation for his girlfriend.
Mr. Kellems, a communications strategist who was a part of Mr. Wolfowitz's inner circle from his arrival at the World Bank in 2005, was quoted in a newspaper article stating that "all arrangements" concerning Mr. Wolfowitz's companion "were made at the direction of the bank's board of directors."
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
A section of the proposed Free Flow of Information Act advocates that certain bloggers receive a key legal protection that is currently reserved for journalists.
The timing of the news cycle was brilliant. The media was in the final stages of gearing up for the year's biggest spy non-event: the publication of Tenet's CYA memoir, a tome destined to soon become doorstops throughout the nation. At that juncture the office of the Director of National Intelligence chose to announce that the year-long study on the use of industrial contractors by the intelligence community was not going to be released. The number and use of industrial contractors was suddenly a matter of national security.
To wit: Don’t use WS-* unless you need to interoperate with existing WS-* deployments, in particular Microsoft WCF, which is the twenty-first century version of DCOM: the Windows network API they’d like you to program to.
So, no, I don’t want to tear anything down, but I also don’t want to just get along: I want to start building developer tooling around REST, or what Greg Papadopoulos calls RSWS: “Real Simple Web Services”. I think work to date on WS-* represents a sunk investment; use it when you have to (we at Sun are shipping the tooling to let Javaland talk to WCF) but not as the basis for anything new. Because the design of WS-* just has too many problems to be suitable for enterprise use, in the general case.
You would have to know more about programming than I do to judge the merits of the discussion; but I would be interested in hearing from my programmer readers.
But the story was different at Digg. Its user base, notoriously opinionated and used to a community-run atmosphere with very little editorial control, revolted. "The Digg community is one that loves to have their voice heard, and this has been something that struck a chord with them," Rose said.
Members rebelled against what they saw as unnecessary censorship, flooding the site with submissions and comments containing the cracked key to the point where not a single one of Digg's top-ranked technology stories didn't pertain to the issue. And it reached beyond Digg, too. The HD DVD key made appearances in numerous blog and forum posts, Twitter messages and Photoshopped images all over the Internet.
In a blog post Tuesday night, Rose bowed to his site's readers. "After seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear," he wrote. "You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company...effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be." Rose even stressed his solidarity with the membership by posting the key in the title of his post.
Suspend the account of the people who post the stories. Digg could be sued, and the people who Digg bomb are not thinking about what could happen to Digg. It shows a lack of consideration on the people who bombed Digg. If people don't like what AACS is doing they can build their own site and get sued by AACS. People should respect the rules of website they are posting on. I delete posts all the time because people spam me with sales messages, and will even ban people if they persist.
With a continued decline in newspaper and magazine circulation, it is clear that the industry has a whole hasn't found a formula that works.
As PR practitioners, we should be concerned. We still rely on the media to get messages out and to vet impartially statements made on behalf of clients. Although the reliance isn't as strong as it once was, PR would suffer if publishers begin to disappear.
Are you an experienced Java programmer who appreciates the hearty support of Java platforms and yet is envious of how quickly new languages such as Ruby can be used to build Web applications?Jackson writes far more succinctly than your humble servant and gets the news in fast. But I seriously doubt this article would have been written had I not been blogging these meetings for the past three years. Blogging is redefining what constitutes news.
Now you can have the best of both worlds with an emerging language called Groovy, according to a presentation given last week at the Northern Virginia Java Users Group.
First USENIX Workshop on Offensive Technologies (WOOT '07)
August 6, 2007
Boston, MA, USA
Sponsored by USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association
WOOT '07 will be co-located with the 16th USENIX Security Symposium (Security '07), which will take place August 6–10, 2007.
Important Dates
Submissions due: June 7, 2007, 11:59 p.m. PDT
NEW ORLEANS - When the Army Corps of Engineers solicited bids for drainage pumps for New Orleans, it copied the specifications — typos and all — from the catalog of the manufacturer that ultimately won the $32 million contract, a review of documents by The Associated Press found.
As I write this, Digg has gone more than a little crazy. It started when users dugg a story on the AACS processing key that allows decryption of all HD-DVD movies published before April 23rd. Digg, apparently along with a number of other Web sites, received a request from the AACS copyright holders to take down their references to that story. They complied.
But on today's socially filtered Web, that didn't go over so well. Digg users responded by creating and digging an avalanche of stories including the processing key, including everything from silly images to Onion-style news reports that just happen to mention this valuable little bit of hex. (Right now, I think you have to go six pages deep to find a story that's NOT about the processing key.)
Well, after hours of digg-bombing, Digg has capitulated: As Kevin Rose mentions on the company blog, Digg will allow stories on the processing key to run.
TechDispenser.com is different from the bot-powered landscape of news aggregators, because a real-life editor filters through our growing network of technology blogs and personally categorizes, tags and prioritizes every piece of content on the site.
This means you spend less of your time filtering through mountains of news, blogs and information and get straight to what’s important in technology now.
Please don't email me if you use worldnet.att.net, roadrunner, or comcast. Their incompetent anti-spam blacklists block the whole subnet including our mail server's IP address. So if I reply to you, the reply will bounce. Tip: switch to Gmail; your life will get better in a lot more ways than smarter spam filtering.
Battle of the Framework All Stars CMMI for Software vs. SPMN 16 Critical Software Practices
New Media Technologies and Tech Emergence
Wham! What Vonage's $58 Million Surprise Means to YOU
What Does the Future Hold for ECM? Speaker: Russ Stalters, Chief Technology Officer, Applied Information Sciences, Inc.
IPRA's May 2007 Luncheon: PR Practice Spring Tune-up: Everything You Need to Know to Keep Your Business Humming
Ter ere van Koninginnedag heeft WereldExpat een speciale uitgave van zijn nieuwsbrief gemaakt. www.wereldexpat.nl is een website van de Wereldomroep. Het wordt gemaakt voor en door Nederlanders die voor korte of langere tijd in het buitenland wonen.
--But, my biggest take-away was the fact that in a full-day of chatter about social media, the only policy related conversation was a bit of back and forth with Google's lead content industry liaison. No mention of the many laws seeking to impinge social networking sites. No talk about new copyright rules. No chatter about social regulation of video. This is not a criticism. Just an observation. It shows that the lure of deals still overwhelms consideration of rules that might impact business models in the future.
Also notable is Alice Marshall’s long-standing Presto Vivace blog. I like her short vignette style.
A company representing Internet users in more than 100 countries filed a federal lawsuit yesterday seeking the identities of people responsible for collecting millions of e-mail addresses on behalf of spammers.Well done Unspam Technologies.The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, was filed on behalf of Project Honey Pot, a service of Unspam Technologies, a Utah firm that consults with companies and government agencies.
Google's search engine technology has so radically changed the practice of public relations that it may be time to change PR's name entirely. Why? PR is built on the assumption that companies, institutions and politicians could not only manage, but actually mold, the perceptions of all of their key audiences—or "publics," as the earliest PR practitioners of a century ago called them.
Google has upset the PR paradigm. It's much harder to control information. It's much harder to get out ahead of bad news. And every piece of public information about your company—the good, the bad, the ugly—lives on the Web more or less forever.
Sen. Clinton says such a move would save the federal government between $10 billion and $18 billion per year.
The General Services Administration is conducting a sources sought market survey in accordance with FAR, Part 10. This notice neither constitutes an Invitation for Bids (IFB) or a Request for Proposal (RFP), nor does it restrict the Government to an ultimate acquisition approach. All businesses that are interested in possibly submitting a proposal if requested in the future may respond to this sources sought notice no later than the closing date of the announcement. If the responsible business has a GSA schedule please include the schedule number in their responses.
The General Services Administration (GSA) is looking for sources that can enhance GSA's information sharing capabilities. These information sharing capabilities include the following:
1. Formal languages such as Resource Description Framework(RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF), Common Logic (CL) and Metaslang
2. Use of open source rules engines, reasoners and theorem provers.
3. Application of logics to practical problems in information sharing including description logic and first order logic.
4. Methods and approaches in knowledge representation, semantic integration, information flow, formal concept analysis, category theory and the semantic web.
Respondents should provide contact information and a brief description on the following web site http://www.osera.gov/web/guest/isp as "Interested Parties."
Called Reuters NewsScope, the product comes in two flavors: real time and archived. The real-time newswire lets subscribers scan live feeds from Reuters' global news coverage, monitoring for events that affect companies they're trading in. The archive lets the machines make sense of that information: When the tsunami devastated Southeast Asia in December 2004, for instance, here's how stocks X, Y, and Z moved.
"There's already an immense amount of content that explains price movements such as a stock split," explains Kirsti Suutari, global business manager for algorithmic trading at Reuters' enterprise trading division. "What's more difficult to do, on a machine-only basis, is to correlate price movements to something like Hurricane Katrina."
When the emails comes out, so will the truth - Once you have to start handing over emails, there is blood in the water.
Take the US attorney firing. I'm not a lawyer, but even I know enough never to tell an easily refuted lie when you can get by with a uselessly vague truth. I'd have been saying things like "It was time for new blood." or "David Iglesias did a fine job, but a shakeup will keep everybody on their toes, and Larry Gomez deserves his chance to show us what he can do."
Some answers are so bad as to resist analysis. If I ask you what 9 times 7 is and you say "rhubarb," I'm no longer in a position to correct your math.
One federal blogger is Jay Bernhardt, director of CDC’s National Center for Health Marketing. In his blog, Health Marketing Musings, he wrote that new media will change how health information is produced, exchanged, packaged and consumed.
“For those of us working in governmental health communication and marketing at all levels, a fundamental challenge we all face is how to balance the old with the new,” he said. How true! Isn’t that the challenge for government and for health care?
If it isn’t OK to do it in the physical world, it isn’t OK to do it online.
Countless e-mails to and from many key White House staffers have been deleted -- lost to history and placed out of reach of congressional subpoenas -- due to a brazen violation of internal White House policy that was allowed to continue for more than six years, the White House acknowledged yesterday.
McClatchy's D.C. bureau chief, John Walcott, recalls a Justice Department official telling Taylor that she simply "had" to use certain information he had given her for a story.
A week ago, EMI and Apple set the digital-music world buzzing with news from London. No, the Beatles weren't coming to iTunes just yet. Rather, EMI had broken ranks with the rest of the major labels and decided to offer its catalog to music retailers without digital-rights-management software that restricts consumers' ability to copy files and transfer them between devices.
That was the biggest headline of the day, but not the only news. The DRM-free songs would be ripped at a higher bit rate, giving them improved sound quality. They would cost more -- $1.29 per song, though albums would cost the same in both formats. And lower-quality, 99-cent DRM-protected songs weren't being phased out, just making room for the new offerings. ...
... First and most obviously, a major label is finally treating its customers like customers, instead of regarding them as likely shoplifters who should be given as few rights as possible.
Shorter Microsoft - we support open standards; it just has to be our standard. I don't see how they are going to make this stick.The petition, which was uploaded to Microsoft's U.K. site on March 29, asks businesses to show their support for the Open XML format being fast-tracked through the standardization process at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The format is integral to Office 2007, but Microsoft is pushing it as an international open standard for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
"We already have an international standard, the OpenDocument format, and governments are increasingly adopting it," said Taylor on Thursday. "Having a second standard is utterly unnecessary."
And the January lunch, although almost undeniably inappropriate, was not planned or approved by Doan and came months after one election and years before another.
Vendors and evangelists at the U.S. IPv6 Summit in Reston, Va., are beating the drums for the seamless, always-on ubiquitous network serving up device-agnostic services and applications promised by the new generation of Internet protocols. They gave talks citing the usual uses for these networks, from programmable refrigerators to digitally connected network-centric warfighters.
What were largely missing in the presentations were the tools and applications to use the brand-new IPv6 networks being set up by military and civilian agencies.
With $12 million in sales last year and some 1600 corporate clients -- including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Oracle, PepsiCo and about 100 of the Fortune 500 -- business information company ZoomInfo has decided to provide free access to most of what it had been charging for.
On Monday, ZoomInfo.com plans to offer a newly improved business-oriented semantic search service, tailored for finding information about companies and their employees, to any Internet user under an advertisement-supported model.
"We believe that this is disruptive to the business information world," said Russell Glass, VP of products and marketing for ZoomInfo.
The group, a nonprofit professional association for members of the intelligence community -- including private contractors, academics and members of U.S. spy agencies -- is largely unknown. That's quite a feat, because its chairman, retired Navy Vice Adm. John M. McConnell, the former head of the National Security Agency, left recently to be sworn in as director of national intelligence, the president's top intelligence adviser. (A new chairman for the professional association is expected to be selected soon.)
