Tag: Computing in the Cloud
-
HOWTO: Protect your small organization against electronic adversaries
October is “cyber security awareness month“. Among other notable announcements, Google just rolled out “advanced protection” — free for any Google account. So, in the spirit of offering pragmatic advice to real users, I wrote a short document that’s meant not for the usual Tinker audience but rather for the sort of person running a…
-
Sidekick Users' Data Lost: Blame the Cloud?
Users of Sidekick mobile phones saw much of their data disappear last week due to engineering problems at a Microsoft data center. Sidekick devices lose the contents of their memory when they don’t have power (e.g. when the battery is being changed), so all data is transmitted to a data center for permanent storage –…
-
What Economic Forces Drive Cloud Computing?
You know a technology trend is all-pervasive when you see New York Times op-eds about it — and this week saw the first Times op-ed about cloud computing, by Jonathan Zittrain. I hope to address JZ’s argument another day. Today I want to talk about a more basic issue: why we’re moving toward the cloud.…
-
Lessons from Amazon's 1984 Moment
Amazon got some well-deserved criticism for yanking copies of Orwell’s 1984 from customers’ Kindles last week. Let me spare you the copycat criticism of Amazon — and the obvious 1984-themed jokes — and jump right to the most interesting question: What does this incident teach us? Human error was clearly part of the problem. Somebody…
-
Satyam and the Inadvertent Web
Satyam is one of the handful of large companies who dominate the IT outsourcing market in India, A week ago today, B. Ramalinga Raju, the company chairman, confessed to a years-long accounting fraud. More than a billion dollars of cash the company claimed to have on hand, and the business success that putatively generated those…
-
Cloud(s), Hype, and Freedom
Richard Stallman’s recent description of ‘the cloud’ as ‘hype’ and a ‘trap’ seems to have stirred up a lot of commentary, but not a lot of clear discussion of the problems Stallman raised. This isn’t surprising- the term ‘the cloud’ has always been vague. (It was hard to resist saying ‘cloudy.’ 😉 When people say…
-
The Decline of Localist Broadcasting Policies
Public policy, in the U.S. at least, has favored localism in broadcasting: programming on TV and radio stations is supposed to be aimed, at least in part, at the local community. Two recent events call this policy into question. The first event is the debut of the Pandora application on the iPhone. Pandora is a…
-
New bill advances open data, but could be better for reuse
Senators Obama, Coburn, McCain, and Carper have introduced the Strengthening Transparency and Accountability in Federal Spending Act of 2008 (S. 3077), which would modify their 2006 transparency act. That first bill created USASpending.gov, a searchable web site of government outlays. USASpending.gov—which was based on software developed by OMB Watch and the Sunlight Foundation—allows end users…
-
Government Data and the Invisible Hand
David Robinson, Harlan Yu, Bill Zeller, and I have a new paper about how to use infotech to make government more transparent. We make specific suggestions, some of them counter-intuitive, about how to make this happen. The final version of our paper will appear in the Fall issue of the Yale Journal of Law and…
-
Privacy: Beating the Commitment Problem
I wrote yesterday about a market failure relating to privacy, in which a startup company can’t convincingly commit to honoring its customers’ privacy later, after the company is successful. If companies can’t commit to honoring privacy, then customers won’t be willing to pay for privacy promises – and the market will undersupply privacy. Today I…