Netizen

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Cyber Security: Growing Challenges

So much is happening online. There's much behind firewalls, but hackers have ended up everywhere before. Worms come down to your desktop, and if you are lucky you get to retrieve your work. Recently a teen spread a worm on Twitter. What's next? Gmail? So it is not like the cloud is sacred territory. There is no sacred territory.

There are rogue individuals, pranksters, spammers, spam spewing companies. Then there are the evil ones. They want your computer down. They want your system down. They want to steal your password, your credit card number. They show up in your inbox hoping to lure you to click on something or the other. It is a numbers game for them. They are counting on very few people to click, and those very few routinely do.

But what about hostile states and terrorist organizations? If the Al Qaeda wants to explode a dirty bomb, does it not fantasize of cyber attacks? It has recruited smart doctors before. Could it recruit hackers? What could a cyber cold war look like? What about a hot one?

For the most part we are counting on the good people in the information technology sector to stay numerous and to always stay one step ahead of the evil ones. We are counting on the market forces. But when it comes to global law enforcement coordination, we are as ill-prepared as on a host of other global issues. People in finance talk of tax havens. There are hacker havens all over the world. We count on hackers being not smart enough to create and spread the next deadly worm. But they routinely do. We keep building up the immune system, we keep finding cures for diseases, kind of like for the biological types over history.

And safety is not all about technology. It is also about criminals going high tech to commit crimes they were already committing before the internet came along.

Just like for global finance, for global terrorism, for global warming, there is ultimately only a global solution to cyber security. Cyber security has to be approached from many different angles if it is to be meaningfully tackled.

In The News

The Cold War moves to cyberspace CNet shadowy foes that prefer to cloak their identities. the United States is "under cyberattack virtually all the time, every day" ...... The Wall Street Journal reported that cyberspies had breached the DOD's Joint Strike Fighter project and also had penetrated the Air Force's air-traffic-control system. ..... Chinese hackers attacked private and government Web sites in the U.S. in retaliation after NATO accidentally struck the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo crisis. ....... Russia defines cyberwar as a force multiplier while China views cyber war as a way to get control of an enemy without the need for engaging on a physical field of battle. "It's straight out of Sun Tzu" ........ In March 2007, Estonian Web sites got knocked out after the regime decided to move a Soviet statue from one park to another. Last August, when Russian tanks rolled across the border, Georgia's government ministries also got overwhelmed by a coordinated cyberattack. ....... defenders of Russia attribute the brief cyberwar to nationalists acting independently.
Bill Clinton: Business is the key to climate change
Apple soars during economic gloom
Microsoft opens up its answer to Google AdSense
Would a ratings system improve Craigslist?
IBM puts Oracle to the sword with EnterpriseDB
Report: Kindle 2 costs $185.49 to build
No surprise here: Oprah huge for Twitter
Firefox 3.0.9 targets 12 security vulnerabilities
Security flaw leads Twitter, others to pull OAuth support
Face recognition comes to Flickr
Gates: Cyberattacks a constant threat hackers stole information about $300 billion fighter jet program.
'60 Minutes' video: Cold fusion is hot again

Camelback Displays: Every Type Of Portable Display

Every type of portable display under the sun, that's the idea.

Aren't you glad every type of portable display under the sun is all under one roof? Does that not make your life easier? Camelback Displays got your back alright.

By the time you have made your purchases you will realize there are many, many different ways of putting together your displays to have the maximum impact on your audience. Many permutations and combinations can be imagined. But not before you have made your basic purchases of the essential display items.

(This is an advertisement.)

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Converting To The Mass Follow Formula On Twitter

InRev TwitIn
TopFollowed
MyTweetFollowers

I only follow about 200 people on Twitter now, and it is not like I read every tweet by every person I follow. You log in, and most of the time you skim through that first page. You spend some time in the stream. So the best way to have a more representative stream might be to follow a large number of people.

But I also like the idea of having a smaller group of people. For that I think I got TweetDeck. There I can create a group for the current 200 people. That way I can get the best of both worlds: TweetDeck to follow a small, intimate group, or two, or three - I also have a group with only 20 people there - and Twitter as a marketing tool.

I am also driven by a desire to jack up the traffic for this blog.

A few minutes back I read this article by my friend in Bangalore Bhupendra Khanal, the top Tweet in that city measured by the number of followers he has - he is also from Nepal like me - and he kind of made me think.

Tweeters: Here's The Growing Formulae! go to a mass follower .... and follow his followers
http://help.twitter.com/forums/10713/entries/14959

Enter Guy Kawasaki: Looking For Mr. Goodtweet: How To Pick Up Followers On Twitter

Kevin Rose: 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers

Twitter Is Not Micro
The Depth Of Your Friendships At Twitter
Goal: A Billion People On Twitter
Search Come Full Circle: That Human Element
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter
I Talked To Google Through Twitter And It Worked Like Magic
Twitter And The Time Dimension
What Should Facebook Do
TweetDeck, Power Twitter, Twitter Globe, Better Than Facebook
TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter
I Get Twitter

Monday, April 20, 2009

Stephen Hawking Has Taken Sick

I was not around when Newton was around, I was not around when Einstein was around, I missed those dudes by a few centuries combined in passing, but I have been around when Stephen Hawking has been around, and the thought gives me tickles.

My introduction to Hawking was through his book, A Brief History Of Time. I first read it during my Class 10 year, which ordinarily would have been the sophomore year of high school in the American system, except I went to this school in Kathmandu founded by the British, and we did both the Nepali high school thing - high school ended after 10, not 12 years - and the British O and A Levels (a guest speaker one day talked of "A Levels and B Levels," this top doctor dude), long story short, we would end up having 13 years of school. We got told that really prepared us for college. And the O and A Levels came by way of the Cambridge University Board. Hawking was a professor there. That's stretching it, but still. (My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher)

I understood the book during the first reading. It read like a novel, I was able to follow all its concepts: that same year I also read Ted Sorensen's Kennedy, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years Of Solitude. I have been claiming my physics smarts ever since. Around the same time I came face to face with the anti-Madhesi prejudice warps that existed and exists to this day in Nepal and when it came my way by way of the school administration, it felt like waking up to gravity, something fundamental, something that had been around a while, something now whose presence I felt acutely, but lacked any vocabulary to express, more, lacked any power to do something about it. The power was to come two decades later when I threw myself into the Madhesi Kranti in Nepal from the safety of New York City.

I acquired a physics like fascination for social reality. Before I got hit by the social gravity, I wanted to be a medical doctor, that was the first thing I wanted to be in life. Then I realized I don't need a microscope to see germs, I could see them with my naked eyes.

I feel like I am both a high school and a college dropout. I was emotionally absent the final three years of high school, and the final four years of college: I did five years, it is called changing your major too many times.

Group Dynamics

And Hawking speaks to me more today than ever before. Well, I am a tech startup guyperson.

NewsDesk: China, Twitter, Hawking, Obama

China’s Influence Grows Along With Its Car Sales After a century in which American tastes largely set the course of the global automotive market, China is poised to increasingly take on the role of global trendsetter.
The Twitter Revolution The company is hiring like crazy -- it expects to double its size in the next month or two .... Even faster than Google, Amazon and eBay in their days, the three-year-old Twitter has become deeply embedded in the culture.
Twitter & LSD - 25 Similarities LSD alters users’ perceptions of time. What seems like a minute can actually be hours....... Just as mundane experiences can appear fantastic-plastic while on LSD, so too can the experience of otherwise trivial bits of information appear mind-expanding.
Stephen Hawking Very Ill Hawking has been fighting a chest infection for several weeks
Oracle Buys Sun ..... deal halts a downward spiral for Sun ... marks a continuation of Oracle's half-decade-long acquisition tear
History Of Silicon Valley plucky entrepreneurs who start from nothing and against all odds, build a successful company.
Bush And The Rule Of Law The use of torture is part of the laws of war and only Congress has the constitutional authority
Heat Advisory For San Francisco
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of "aha" moment in your memory
29 Years Of Robert Mugabe The once prosperous, successful nation has since devolved into a lawless state under the rule of the same man who fought for independence nearly 30 years ago.
Iran's President Slams Israel, Prompts Walkouts Ahmadinejad described the Holocaust as a "pretext" for aggression against Palestinians
Facebook's Recruiting Problem, Explained Facebook's people problem isn't limited to executive retention. The hot startup with over 200 million users also has a surprisingly hard time recruiting new employees -- from top executives to college grads to star Googlers.
Crowd Forms Against an Algorithm On Monday, Amazon.com confessed to “an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error” that caused thousands of books — a large proportion of them gay and lesbian themed — to lose their sales rankings, making them difficult to find in basic searches.
Obamaism: Charm and Disarm The Barack Obama global charm offensive continues unabated as he returns to Washington from Trinidad and Tobago where he spent two days as the main attraction and the great hope at the Fifth Summit of the Americas. In a single weekend, Obama completely transformed the diplomatic landscape of the region, by saying the most reasonable, middle-of-the-road things—We are interested in a different kind of relationship with Cuba. Venezuela is no threat to us; why not be courteous?

FranchiseAdvantage: Computer Franchise, Internet Franchise

FranchiseAdvantage.com connects you to the right franchise, be it computer franchise, or internet franchise, among many other franchise opportunities.

You can launch your own franchise, buy an existing one, or buy an individually owned and operated business. The site helps you with all of the three. The reverse is also true. If you want to sell a franchise you have, the site helps you with that as well, obviously.

FranchiseAdvantage.com is also in the recycling business, only it recycles businesses and franchises. The site makes it possible for you to "search, research, and contact." It is "middle man." I found listings from all over the country at the site. Some have called it "the best site for buying a franchise."

(This is an advertisement.)

NexGen: Solvent Recovery System, Waste Recovery System

NexGen is located in Lindenhurst, New York, and is a leader in providing solvent recycling equipment to factories in a large variety of industries. It has over 8,000 customers in both public and private sectors, small and big companies. It helps reduce waste and re-use expensive solvents. It helps protect the environment in the process. It is a leader in waste solvent handling solutions.

NexGen is well positioned as a company as we become more conscious environmentally as a population, and it feels like we might be on the cusp of a green tech revolution. A company like NexGen makes environment sense, but then it also makes business sense. It helps with cost reduction.

NexGen offers the following: Solvent Recovery, Solvent Recovery System, Waste Recovery System.

(This is an advertisement.)

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Blogging = Learning + Teaching + Churning + Entertaining

Image via Wikipedia

Okay, this is not E=mc^2, but I think I got something here. I managed to throw a "2" somewhere in there.

Blogging = Learning + Teaching + Churning + Entertaining (2 way)

There is research to prove blogging is good for your brain, like running is good for your thighs. Has to be. You can intuitively conclude. You don't need research for that. And by blogging, I mean blogging. That includes podcasting, that includes videoblogging. That includes micro-blogging, of course.

The Internet is the Ultimate Media. Every moment of every life can be recorded, technically speaking. But what if you are not interested in the mundane, what if you are only interested in ideas? What if you don't care if they are mixed up?

A blog is a web log. The web is the interweb - I got that word from Morgan Grice a few days ago - and it is the web that is key. How you log on to it, how you latch on to it, does not matter. Every netizen is a producer, every netizen is a potential consumer.

The netizens suck on the nipples of Mother Web for nourishment. Netizens produce knowledge, perspectives. Even when nothing groundbreaking is happening, even if it is just the proliferation of existing knowledge, something fascinating is happening.

Like I have said many times, you can not bring all Nepalis to MIT, but you can take MIT to everyone in Nepal. If all textbooks, if all journal articles, and all lecture videos are added to the soup called the social web, how much will you be missing if you are not on campus?

And the blog is the center of that action for each individual netizen. If nothing else, it allows you to display your ignorance.

The interweb is not just about putting faces in front of computer screens. It is about taking group dynamics to a whole different level. Barack Obama rode the internet all the way to the most powerful office in the world. How much more real does it have to be? Grassroots governance is going to be more exciting than grassroots campaigning.

The blog is where it gels for the netizen. That space is your space, and it has all the wheels of media. It has the feel of a classroom. It is in your face like a microphone. It is expansive like air, water, space. It is casual like gum. It is private. I mean, if you are struggling to get page hits.

Spamming Om Malik
Digg Button, Twitter Button For Your Blog Posts
Blogging Several Times A Day
Blogging Tips
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

The United States Of Entrepreneurs

Visionary Entrepreneurs Will Recreate The World
That StartUp Mentality (2)
That StartUp Mentality

The Economist: The United States Of Entrepreneurs
Special Report

Heroic entrepreneurs Azim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant ......... entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well. ...... in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation. ... The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. ....... TiE was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 ....... Wipro’s Mr Premji, was educated at Stanford ....... somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem. ....... “the bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices”. ....... “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”. ....... entrepreneurship, like all business, is a social activity ........ flourishes in clusters. A third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston ........ Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to help start Garmin, a GPS giant. Herb Kelleher was 40 when he founded Southwest Airlines ........ the average boss was 39 when he or she started ....... Venture capitalists fund only a small fraction of start-ups. The money for the vast majority comes from personal debt or from the “three fs”—friends, fools and families. .......... Brin and Page founded the company without any money at all and launched it with about $1m raised from friends and connections. ....... some of the most successful entrepreneurs concentrate on processes rather than products ....... Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entrepreneurial Davids. ....... Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world. Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow. .......... downturns can act as a “good cold shower for the economic system”, releasing capital and labour from dying sectors and allowing newcomers to recombine in imaginative new ways. ....... The information age is making it ever easier for ordinary people to start businesses and harder for incumbents to defend their territory. Back in 1960 the composition of the Fortune 500 was so stable that it took 20 years for a third of the constitutent companies to change. Now it takes only four years. ....... advanced economies are characterised by a shift from manufacturing to services. Service firms are usually smaller than manufacturing firms and there are fewer barriers to entry. ...... Microsoft, Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. Hewlett-Packard, Geophysical Service (now Texas Instruments), United Technologies, Polaroid and Revlon started in the Depression.
Managing entrepreneurship
Time for entrepreneurship
The United States of Entrepreneurs Google and Facebook barely existed a decade ago. .... America was the first country, in the late 1970s, to ditch managerial capitalism for the entrepreneurial variety. .... willing to sacrifice old certainties for new opportunities ...... the world’s most mature venture-capital industry ..... Highland Capital Partners receives about 10,000 plausible business plans a year, conducts about 1,000 meetings followed by 400 company visits and ends up making 10-20 investments a year, all of which are guaranteed to receive an enormous amount of time and expertise. ......... Stanford University gained around $200m in stock when Google went public. ..... 52% of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants, up from around a quarter ten years ago. ...... In 2006 foreign nationals were named as inventors or co-inventors in a quarter of American patent applications, up from 7.6% in 1998. ......... “patent trolls”—lawyers who bring cases against companies for violating this or that trumped-up patent ........ rising xenophobia is making the country less open to immigrants. ....... wealth-creating universities, such as Harvard and Stanford ...... Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs, who cut their teeth in Stanford and Silicon Valley, are now returning home in ever larger numbers, determined to recreate Silicon Valley’s magic in Bangalore or Shanghai. ......... Goldman Sachs is spending $100m over the next five years to promote entrepreneurialism among women in the developing world ...... —the EU and Japan—are far less entrepreneurial. ....... only 5% of European companies created from scratch since 1980 have made it into the list of the 1,000 biggest EU companies by market capitalisation. The equivalent figure for America is 22%. ....... different cultural attitudes ...... When Denis Payre was thinking about leaving a safe job in Oracle to start a company in the late 1980s, his French friends gave him ten reasons to stay put whereas his American friends gave him ten reasons to get on his bike. In January last year Mr Payre’s start-up, Business Objects, was sold to Germany’s SAP for €4.8 billion. ......... cultural problems are reinforced by structural ones. ..... A depressing number of European universities remain suspicious of industry, subsisting on declining state subsidies but still unwilling to embrace the private sector. ......... America has at least 50 times as many “angel” investors as Europe ..... In the 1990s Silicon Valley’s moneybags believed that they should invest “no further than 20 miles from their offices”, but lately the Valley’s finest have been establishing offices in Asia and Europe. .............. technological breakthroughs are being made in many more places ....... applying American methods to new economies can start a torrent of entrepreneurial creativity. ........... The success of Skype, which pioneered internet-based telephone calls, was a striking example of the new European entrepreneurialism. The company was started by a Swede and a Dane who contracted out much of their work to computer programmers in Estonia. In 2005 they sold it to eBay for $2.6 billion. .......... the Japanese have been less successful than the Europeans at adapting to entrepreneurial capitalism
Entrepreneurs in India and China Bollywood produces 1,000 films a year that are watched by 3.6 billion people (the figures for Hollywood are 700 and 2.6 billion). .... In 2003-05 some 5,000 tech-savvy Indians with more than five years’ experience of working in America returned to India. ...... The British introduced the ideal of meritocracy to India; Jawaharlal Nehru gave it a technocratic twist by launching the Indian Institutes of Technology; and India’s natural love of argument did the rest. ......... When Wu Yi, the country’s then vice-premier, visited America in 2006, she took more than 200 entrepreneurs with her. About 60 Chinese companies are now traded on NASDAQ. ....... So many Chinese expats have returned in the past few years that Valley-slang has given them a special name, B2C (back to China). ....... Baidu is a Chinese Google; Dangdang is a Chinese Amazon; Taobao is a Chinese eBay; Oak Pacific Interactive is a mishmash of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Craigslist; Chinacars is a Chinese American Automobile Association. .......... Baidu’s founder, Robin Li, raised funds from American venture capitalists and offered stock options to his earliest employees. ......... Jeff Chen has developed an internet browser which has attracted venture capital from Denmark and is available in 20 languages. ......... Some of the most innovative entrepreneurs are working with mobile telephony ....... the Chinese reportedly maintain three sets of books, one for their bankers, one for their accountants and one for the government. Businessmen often neglect their firms because they spend so much time cultivating political connections.
Lands of opportunity
The formula for entrepreneurship would-be Silicon Valleys: Silicon Alley in New York, Silicon Glen in Scotland and even, depressingly, Silicon Roundabout in London. ........ the anchor-firm model ........ People become entrepreneurs when the economy stops supplying jobs. ....... the local-hero model ...... culture makes almost all the difference ....... economic policies matter too .... culture can be changed ..... India and China have become the second and third most entrepreneurial countries in the world, trailing only America ......... a vibrant higher education system .... openness to outsiders. Emigrés have always been more entrepreneurial than their stay-at-home cousins: the three most entrepreneurial spaces in modern history have been the ones inhabited by the Jewish, Chinese and Indian diasporas ........... they mix and match knowledge ........ Shai Agassi, an Israeli-American businessman based in Palo Alto, California, is promising to upend the car industry by going electric ........ local cultures matter
Entrepreneurs doing good
The entrepreneurial society

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Spamming Om Malik

Om Malik and I used to be Facebook friends. Mitch Kapor used to follow me on Twitter. Those were the days.

TCC: Twitter Community College
Twitter Tips: It's A Bird, It's A Bird
Mitch Kapor Now Following Me On Twitter

GigaOm
App roundup: 10 iPhone weather apps (The AppleBlog)
What RSS subscriber numbers really tell us (WebWorkerDaily)
Review: YouTube’s new premium shows design (NewTeeVee)
Sprint starts marketing the Palm Pre (jkOnTheRun)
How to get reliable clean energy from variable resources (Earth2Tech)

I guess I have not exactly arrived yet as a tech blogger.

Om, I got news for you. I am not trying to be a tech blogger. I just happen to have a blog. I am a startup guy.

We have mutual friends in Sree (Five Years Of Gmail: What Would Gsus Do? ) and JP (I Get Twitter).

And a not so mutual friend in Kristi Fundu: https://twitter.com/relaxmedia/status/1558133194 (My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher)

Digg Button, Twitter Button For Your Blog Posts

Add digg button to each of your blog posts | Bloganol.com
Cranial Soup: Add a TwitThis Button to your Blogger posts

Add This

I just added these buttons to my blog. I figured they will help spread the word out a little. Although my blog has best served me for small group communication purposes. This is no mass traffic blog. It is a communication tool. Helps me get my point across. And also speaks to my blogging hobby. It is both business and pleasure, like James Bond says in a movie: "Hopefully both!"

You do want a larger audience. You do want to build a community around your blog. Post it and they will come does not cut it. You have to go where people are already assembled.

You add the buttons and it is one step easier for visitors to help you spread the word if the spirit might move them.

One glitch for me now is the two buttons work for individual posts only. Otherwise your general blog URL is what gets tweeted. Still, no complaints. So if you want to tweet/digg a particular blog post, get on the web address with that particular blog post, then press the button.

Blogging Several Times A Day
Blogging Tips
A Blogger Is Also An Editor
Blog Daily
Where Have You Placed Your Ads?
Sites That Pay You To Blog

Pages

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Monday, April 20, 2009

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Saturday, April 18, 2009