Standards News Portal
The Standards News Portal is updated on a daily basis to bring you the most important news about standards, how they are created, and how they affect your business and your life. The Standards News Portal also allows you to search and read all of the 5,535 articles that have been added to the Portal's database since its launch in February 2002, perhaps the largest archive of its type in existence. You can also sort the database by topic or date, by visiting the Portal Archive Page.
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Quote of the Day:
Symbian is the product of a carrier-focused world where voice minutes mattered and data came only from walled gardens
ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn, suggesting that Symbian's day in the sun has passed ...Full Story
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Latest News: |
 From the Standards Blog |
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February 09, 2010
Alexandria Project Chap. 4: Beware of Greeks bearing Trapdoors
Our story so far: Security expert Frank Adversego comes under suspicion when the Library of Congress is hacked by a mysterious cracker with motives unknown and a taste for the bizarre; to protect himself, Frank had better get to the bottom of things. Read the …
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Latest News: From all Sources (sort by topic instead)
NFC stack goes open source
Eric Brown
LinuxDevices.com – February 9, 2010: Inside Contactless, a manufacturer of near field communications (NFC) chips, is releasing "Open NFC," an open source version of its NFC protocol stack for mobile platforms including Linux and Android. Meanwhile, Juniper projects that NFC will play a growing role in a mobile-ticketing market that will reach 15 billion tickets by 2014....Open NFC 3.4 is said to be available for Linux 2.6 and Windows CE 6.0. An Android version is expected to debut with the planned release of Open NFC 3.5 at the end of March.
Open NFC provides NFC middleware for mobile phones and other embedded devices, says Inside Contactless. The stack is said to include a full set of interfaces, NFC software libraries and APIs, and a reference design, says the company....NFC is designed to offer a more power-efficient and affordable alternative to Bluetooth for very short-range, low-bandwidth applications, while also providing a more robust, bandwidth-rich alternative to RFID and other "contactless" technologies.... ...Full Story
With budget released, administration starts pushing cloud message
Emily Long
Next.gov.org – February 9, 2010: The Obama administration has asked Congress for tens of millions of dollars to fund one of its key technology initiatives, moving common computer applications and hardware out of agencies and onto networks operated by private service providers, the government's top technology executive said in an interview with Nextgov on Thursday.
In his fiscal 2011 budget request, President Obama asked for $35 million to fund cloud computing programs and other IT initiatives, and another $70 million for the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop standards....Kundra cautioned that part of the process is setting appropriate security parameters and ensuring data can be shared and moved across different cloud platforms....A cloud computing strategy document will be published in the next two to three months, along with security and interoperability standards. ...Full Story
Macmillan Books Return to Amazon After Dispute
Brd Stone/Motoko Rich
NYTimes.com/Bits – February 8, 2010: Electronic and paper books from the publisher Macmillan were returning to Amazon.com Friday evening, ending a week-long public conflict as the parties negotiated over the future price of e-books....As it signaled last Sunday, Amazon has relented to requests from the major publishers to move from a wholesale model to an agency model, in which publishers sell e-books directly to consumers and pay retailers like Amazon and Apple a set 30 percent commission. The move allows publishers to raise e-book prices from the default $9.99 that Amazon had set for most new releases and best-sellers to as much as $14.99.
Other major book publishers, including Hachette and Harper Collins, have indicated they will also move to an agency model.... ...Full Story
HTML vs. Flash: Can a Turf War Be Avoided?
Stephen Shankland
CNET News.com – February 8, 2010: A difference of opinion among developers has become a high-profile
debate over the future of the Web: should programmers continue using
Adobe Systems' Flash or embrace newer Web technology instead? The debate
has gone on for years, but last week's debut of Apple's iPad -- which
like the iPhone doesn't support Flash -- turned up the heat....Flash has indeed spread to near-ubiquity on computers, with better than
98 percent penetration, according to Adobe's statistics. Its roots lay
with graphical animations, but its success was cemented by providing
an easy streaming video mechanism to a Web that had been plagued with
obstreperous and incompatible technology from Microsoft, Apple, and
Real. But a collection of new technologies -- including a rejuvenated
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) standard used to write Web pages --
are aiming to reproduce some of what Flash offers....After years of HTML standardization disarray, browser makers Apple,
Opera, Mozilla, and most recently Google now are hammering out new
directions for Web standards....At the same time, these allies marching
under the "Open Web" banner also are creating new standards such as
WebGL for accelerated 3D graphics on the Web, enabling better typography
through CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and Web fonts, beefing up support
for others including SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), and improving the
power of JavaScript for writing Web-based programs... ...Full Story
Canonical picks open-source leader for COO
Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols
ComuterWorld Blogs – February 8, 2010: When Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, stepped down and former COO (chief operating officer) Jane Silber moved up, there was concern that the popular Linux company might suffer from a lack of corporate leadership. Worry no more. Open-source industry veteran and leader Matt Asay has joined Canonical as its new COO....I think Asay will help Canonical a great deal. He has the knowledge, expertise and energy that's needed to take Ubuntu from being the darling of Linux fans to also being a popular business operating system choice. ...Full Story
Did Symbian go open source too late?
Dana Blankenhorn
ZDNet Blots – February 5, 2010: With as much excitement as Scandinavians can muster, Symbian has gone completely open source.
Is it too late?...Symbian dominated the mobile world for years....But the world has moved on. Symbian is no longer the leader. Apple is....Symbian is the product of a carrier-focused world where voice minutes mattered and data came only from walled gardens.... ...Full Story
Microsoft-funded CodePlex Foundation gets first exec
John Fontana
Network World – February 4, 2010: The CodePlex Foundation, an organization funded and created by Microsoft, Wednesday named its first executive director, but still has not begun to form its permanent board as promised.
Industry veteran Paula Hunter will assume the role of executive director, the Foundation said. Hunter has held leadership roles at open source organizations such as Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and United Linux.... ...Full Story
Budget freeze could lead agencies to focus on IT projects that reduce costs, report says
Emily Long
Next.gov.org – February 4, 2010: The Obama administration's proposed discretionary spending freeze for fiscal 2011 could end up increasing investments in information technology, according to a report released on Monday by a government research firm.
In an analysis of priorities laid out in the president's Jan. 27 State of the Union address, IDC Government Insights, an independent research and advisory firm, concluded that agencies can reduce spending with strategic investment in IT solutions. The report also found that the budget freeze provides a need for agencies to build more standardized information systems... ...Full Story
The Kantara Initiative for Online Identity: A One-Year Progress Report
J. Trent Adams and Eve Maler
IETF Journal – February 3, 2010: Founded in April 2009, the Kantara Initiative was conceived as an open,
global organization with the mission of promoting interoperability and
technology harmonization across the myriad identity solutions available
and under development. With the proliferation of single-protocol
solutions being pursued, the founders of the Kantara Initiative set out
to promote the deployment of heterogeneous protocols, standards, and
solutions for vendors and end users within the entire network identity
ecosystem...
Rather than setting up another standards body, the Kantara Initiative
focuses on incubation of ideas and concepts. If specifications emerge
from the groups, they are then submitted to other standards-setting
organizations for adoption and operational maintenance. Each chartered
group that anticipates producing specifications selects the standards
body to which it expects to contribute its work when it is fleshed out.... ...Full Story
Cybersecurity budget request is smaller, but adequate, says DHS official
Jill R. Aitoro
Next.gov.org – February 3, 2010: Despite President Obama's request for a slight decrease in cybersecurity spending for fiscal 2011, the budget is enough "to move the ball forward" and will emphasize preventing and responding to cyberattacks rather than tracking down where they originate, a Homeland Security Department official said Tuesday....The division provides analysis of cyber threats and vulnerability analysis and early warnings. It also assists public and private groups in responding to attacks. The division is responsible for carrying out many of the mandates of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, established by the Bush administration.... ...Full Story
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