Tech Cast

techspotlight:

All eyes have been on Google’s battle with the Chinese government since the company announced on Monday that it would no longer maintain its censored Chinese-language search site. Instead, the company began redirecting users of Google.cn to its Hong Kong-based search service, Google.com.hk, where it maintains unaltered Chinese-language search results. Credit: Technology Review However, China isn’t the only front in Google’s battle to protect its vision of an open Internet. When Google announced that it might cease operating Google.cn in January, David Drummond, senior vice president of corporate development and the company’s chief legal officer, wrote that “this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech.” “These issues are coming up all over the world,” says Cynthia Wong, Plesser Fellow and staff attorney at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that promotes an open Internet. Wong says governments around the world are making policy decisions about material on the Internet—particularly when it comes to questions of child protection, copyright, and cyber attacks. She says it’s tempting for them to enlist “technology intermediaries”—companies such as Google that host content or help users find information—to police what users can access. Because Google is so dominant in search and involved with many other Internet services, it often winds up at the center of these controversies, she notes. Technology has shifted censorship from something that governments do to something that often requires participation from companies, says Ross Anderson, chair of the U.K.-based Foundation for Information Policy Research and a professor of security engineering at the University of Cambridge.

Sounds like someone could use a little help from our friend, ER/Studio to define data mining structures and models.

techspotlight:

In recent years, cyber gangs have been careful to spread their operations across multiple Internet service providers, a tactic that makes it much harder for law enforcement and security administrators to track organized crime activity.

But new research shows that gathering data from various places, including anti-malware and anti-spam companies and phishing blacklists, makes it possible to identify dense clusters of ISPs that that appear to be overly tolerant of malicious activity. This pattern was particularly evident in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Researchers from Indiana University at Bloomington and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN, compared the data from a variety of sources that measure ISP reputation from different perspectives.

techspotlight:

Yesterday Google announced the Google Apps Marketplace.

Google already provided a rich set of API’s for Google Apps, so I won’t say “now Google Apps is a platform.”

It already was a platform.

But now 3rd party Google Apps tools can appear to be blessed by Google by being…

 

Interesting. I am curious to see what they come up with…

 

Written for an internal audience…posted to Tumblr for information…My own personal thoughts.

Data is a big issue right? Terabytes and terabytes of the stuff flows around our ever expanding digital networks every minute of every day. We are consumed by data and the need to try and derive some form…